J ♦4IJ.JL iiii=*5£j*^ 




Class ?S3.^5J-5 



Copyright N°. 



^907 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



OLD (SLI^ 



CHICAGO 
Press of The Mayer & M^r Co. 
341-351 Dearborn Sti^ 
1»07 



OI^D OOI^D 



BY GRANVILLE DAVISSON HALL 



AUTHOR OF 



Daughter of the Elm/' <'The Rending 
OF Virginia," Etc. 



An age ago, when time was young 

And summer days were sweet and long — 
When hearts were gay and songs were sung; 

When blood was warm and limbs were strong- 
We roamed the woods through many a rood. 

Or roamed the fields, with -lilt and song; 
Nor deemed that to be sad was good 

Nor dreamed that idle hours were wrong: 
Unhindered how we came or went, 

Nor rested till the day was spent. 

Now shadows deepen in the wood; 

The sun sinks low, the day grows old: 
Let us, in retrospective mood, 

Regild the morning with the sunset's gold. 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Racelvdci 

AUG 31 190/ 

Cooyncht Blrtry 

CLASS ^ a'"' XXc.<N0. 
COPY Q. 



I 






Copyright, 1907 
By Granville Davisson Hall 



n 



A WORD WITH THE GENTLE 
READER, 



Some idle days in the summer of 1898 turned 
my thoughts ''back to Dixie" — ^to the times, the 
things, the places, the people, wherewith my 
earlier years had been associated very many 
years before; and these seemed for the time to 
draw nearer and to be dearer than all else attach- 
ing to my later life. 

These unconventional sketches grew, a good 
deal as the gourds grow in that southern lati- 
tude, between the days, with perhaps rather more 
facility and luxuriance than value. The planting 
of the seed was more a matter of accident than 
design. Recollections of the Old Blacksmith had 
been haunting me in an importunate way; and 
one evening, to lay the ghost, rather than for any 
better reason, I sat down to put him on paper. 
But no sooner had he been quieted than other 



ghosts — his contemporaries — came up from that 
"vasty deep/' and would no more "down'' than 
Banquo's. 

In an adventure of this kind it is the first step 
that counts. When, Hke Obidah, the son of 
Abensina, we stray into alluring but unknown by- 
paths, there is no foreseeing just where we shall 
bring up nor what may befall us on the way ; and 
there are times when we do not much care, but 
commit ourselves to Fortune and accept what- 
ever reward or punishment she may have in store 
for us. 

Some of the sketches then written have been 
omitted from this collection. This is a case 
where sins of omission are likely to be less fla- 
grant than those of commission. It is always safe 
to leave out. When a hungry boy finds himself 
in a summer orchard where the ground is strewn 
with windfalls, kissed into ripeness by the sun and 
mellowed in the shade by the warmth of mother 
earth, he eagerly stufifs all his pockets with the 
harvest of crimson and gold — of which he thinks 
it impossible to have too much. Later, with the 

8 



edge taken off his first hunger, he revises this 
opinion and throws away such of the apples as 
then seem not quite up to his more exacting 
standard. In Hke vein, in looking over this ma- 
terial, it has seemed wiser to prune than to swell 
by a too luxuriant growth. Doubtless it could 
have been further improved by the same process. 
The waiter hardly dares hope to find many 
readers share the mood in which these pages are 
written; yet he realizes it is only from such he 
can expect a sympathetic and charitable judg- 
ment. 

Glencoe, 111., August, 1907. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Page 
Time's Seedfield — Municipal Ethics — The Sim- 
ple Life : 11 

Life Among the Hills — Debt of City to Coun- 
try 29 

The Village Blacksmith 34 

The Old Wheelwright and Ferryman 46 

An Aboriginal Medicine Man — Becomes Civil- 
ized 55 

A Quaint Old Romancer 65 

A Theologic Family — A Pale-Face Iroquois.... 11 

''Law-Days" — The Little Constable — Fistic 

Tourneys — The Rail-Splitters 85 

A Virginia Patriarch and His Home 97 

The Old Merchant and His Partner 106 

A Sucker-Catching Old Cobbler... 112 

A Man Who Had the Gift of Continuance 119 

A Variegated Group 125 

Timbering on the Monongahela — Teaming with 

Embellishments .- 136 

The Shadow of a Tragedy 144 

A Pioneer in the Wilderness 147 

A Well-to-do Farmer's Home *. 150 

A Scion of the F. F. V. — Nephew of Lorenzo 

Dow — Literary Adventure 158 

School Days — Apollo Belvedere — Daring Rescue 164 

The Reformed Inebriate 173 

The Old School House on the Common 179 

Religious Experiences of the Old Church 187 

The Gilding of a Boyish Summer 196 

A Last Backward Glance 210 



OL.1D OOL.ID 



Time's Seedfield — Municipal Ethics — The 
Simple Life. 



THK HAMLET. 

The time of these fragmentary recollections 
goes back to the middle forties and runs down 
through the gamut of some fifteen boyish years. 
The place about which they gather was a pretty 
hamlet amid the everlasting hills, beside a beau- 
tiful river, in God's country. When Cervantes 
begins his history of the world-renowned Knight 
of the Sorrowful Figure, he ''does not care to 
recollect'' the name of the village which had 
given him birth. By like indulgence, the writer 
trusts he may be permitted to forget for the 
moment the name of the little hamlet associated 
with these recollections, though, in truth, it is 

11 



''graven as with a pen of iron'' on his heart for- 
ever. 

The tooth of time and the corrosion of many 
disintegrating and transforming agencies have 
been at work in that long interval to obliterate 
features preserved in memory. The invasion of 
modern commerce, the intrusion of railroad, tele- 
graph and telephone, aided by all the auxiliaries 
these bring with them; new industries and new 
enterprises; new fashions, new fads, new ideas; 
and last, thought not least, Old Father Time, with 
the scythe which ''cuts down all, both great and 
small,'' — have wrought a profound change in 
the people there, in their surroundings, and in 
their life and aspirations. The farms adjacent 
have been leased for oil exploitation ; natural gas 
has been tapped; a weekly newspaper, which 
has progressed beyond the patent outside, adver- 
tises the rates at which it will be supplied; for 
the streets, innocent in the olden time of side- 
walk, drainage or lights, are now paved, drained 
and piped for gas. The fine bituminous coal 
that underlies the hills is being bought up by 

12 



great syndicates. Mines and mining stores have 
been opened in and around the village; and the 
by-ways and by-places are being filled with the 
strange faces of an alien throng, whose foreign 
tongues seem to my imagination a discordant 
note as I now recall the ancient harmonies. 

Recent photographs of the village show little 
that I recbgnize except the landscape; and the 
spirit of the new community is caught by the 
artist in the pictures, for they are taken from 
view-points which carefully leave the old parts 
of the town in obscurity and put forward the 
new, with its modern self-assertion. An exile, 
looking with pathetic interest for the old places 
he used to know and love, finds only painful evi- 
dences that old things have passed away and live 
only in the memory of a few, who will soon like- 
wise pass into the realm of the forgotten. 

I do not mind confessing that all this makes 
me feel a good deal like poor old Rip Van Win- 
kle felt when he came down out of the mountain, 
after his twenty years of slumber, to find his 
native and beloved old village transformed into 

13 



a bustling American town, with George Wash- 
ington's portrait replacing that of George III on 
the old tavern sign, and incipient Fourth-of-July 
orators wrangHng over an election; with all his 
old cronies — Nick Vedder and the rest — who 
used to haunt about the tavern and smoke their 
sleepy pipes under the summer trees, gone into 
the limbo of things that were. 

This modern, bustling, hustling, village, suc- 
cessor to the one I used to know — surrounded 
with new places with freak names; thronged by 
the strange features of a new generation, some 
native, others alien to the soil — I dismiss, as we 
do an unwelcome caller, with scant courtesy; 
and in thought I take up the old — tenderly, rever- 
ently — thankful for at least the memory of its 
old-time familiarity and its infinite peace; for 
the remembrance of the simple life, the upright 
purpose and the kindly spirit of the people among 
whom my earlier lot was cast. A few of these I 
seek to introduce to the reader en masque. They 
were real once, though little more than shadows 
now to him who tries to portray them to this 

14 



later day ; who would fain draw the likeness with 
a loving rather than a critical touch; to whom 
derision of anything which might seem poor or 
mean to this grander, colder, more mercenary 
time would be the last color into which he would 
willingly dip a brush in limning the picture. 



URBAN RUSTICITY. 

Fifty to sixty years ago the people of this little 
hamlet, drawn together by the primal instinct of 
association for fellowship and mutual help, con- 
fined their aspirations for municipal improvement 
each to his own little allotment of mother earth. 
Few had attained an opulence that would admit 
of contribution to such a luxury as improved 
streets. They were innocent of sidewalks, but 
by no means innocent of mud and other disagree- 
ables. It did not occur to anybody that it was 
practicable to have solid roadways or walks, nor, 
indeed, that there was need of such things. The 
hills were full of stone and covered with timber. 
There was no lack of the raw material. Nature 
had done her share ; but man had caught from 

15 



nature the inertia which made her bounty use- 
less to him. In places a few flat stones were laid 
in front of the more pretentious residences; but 
anything like a walk the length of a block would 
have been looked upon as an irridescent dream. 

EQUAUTY AND -E^RATERNITY. 

The government of this village was a pure 
democracy. All the inhabitants, biped and quad- 
ruped alike, had equal privilege in the highways 
and public common. There was none of that 
pride and exclusiveness which characterize the 
modern village and deny to the domestic ani- 
mals and fowls equal rights in public places. One 
effect of this was an atmosphere of domesticity 
all around the village; for the family cows and 
pigs, and likewise the geese, loitered about the 
gates and bars, the cows chewing the cud of calm 
content, the pigs voicing the perpetual discon- 
tent of peptic stomachs ; while the geese gabbled, 
as they did in Rome, though to less useful pur- 
pose. They flapped their long wings and dropped 
discarded quills, as they sought a scant subsist- 

16 



ence from the crumbs that fell from the table 
of their better fed four-footed neighbors. 

One result of this kind of domestic system was 
fences. They had to be both strong and high. 
The outside domain was the animal kingdom; 
and whatever was to be preserved from the rav- 
ages of its inhabitants needed to be defended. 
But often the incentive of hunger was too much 
for the fences, of which some were good, others 
bad and indifferent. Many a corn-, potato- or 
cabbage-patch, which had been the pride and 
cherished hope of the thrifty owner when the 
sun went down, looked next morning as if the 
Assyrian had come down on it, like the wolf on 
the fold, under cover of the night. One particu- 
lar cow was so talented in the use of her horns it 
was alleged she could unfasten any gate in the 
village. She was the only resident that had a 
free pass. Nothing in the town was too good for 
her; though, in fairness, it must be admitted she 
did not attempt any monopoly of her privileges; 
for when she opened a gate, all of her neighbors 
— bovine, porcine and feathered, — were privi- 

17 



leged to come in and share the spoil. This was 
a Httle hard on the freeholders, b^t as between 
the tenants-at-will it was the straightest equity 
and fraternity. 

Another class of the inhabitants — the canine — 
was accorded a large degree of consideration. 
Every family had a dog, and some a half dozen. 
The poorer the owner, the greater the number 
of his canine dependents. Differences would 
arise at times between the canine and porcine in- 
habitants touching right-of-way in the streets 
and commons. The wretched curs were gener- 
ally wolfish in their hunger, and were always 
the aggressors. Usually the porker made bat a 
feeble defense, and its prolonged and agonizing 
squeals, while undergoing amputation of ears or 
tail, made a trying time for the neighborhood. 

Regarding swine and cows, it is a curious fact 
that they are never content except when in mis- 
chief. If they are on the right side of a fence, 
they rest not till they get on the wrong. Le Sage 
relates in Gil Bias that the scamp, Don Raphael, 
who probably never in his life did willingly a 

18 



meritorious act, on one occasion agreed to help 
rescue a party of travelers from some robbers, 
remarking that he "would just as lief engage 
with the right as the wrong/' It is not so with 
these domestic brutes: they never do the right 
thing if they can find a way to do the wrong. 
They are perverts by nature, and never happy 
except when making somebody else miserable. 
It is a good deal the same with average human- 
ity. We are never content with what we have 
or are, or where we are, but are forever trying 
to get over or around, under or through some 
hedge, fence or wall intended to set apart some 
social or other preserve where we are not 
wanted. 

Most of the villagers got even with the pigs 
once a year by penning and fattening them for 
the holidays; but the number at large seemed 
never to lessen. The cows, too, made a return 
for the liberties allowed (and taken) ; but the 
dogs — well, the dog is the poor man's luxury, 
and luxuries pay no dividends. 



19 



I.AISSEZ F^AIRK. 

There was no municipal corporation ; no mayor 
or trustees; no police; no problem of municipal 
ownership, nor any other problem that disturbed 
anybody. Laissez faire was the unquestioned 
rule. Every one was a law unto himself. And 
yet it would not be easy to find a community to- 
day less inclined to break the tablets, statutory 
or moral. 

LIGHT AND SHADE. 

The streets at night were never lighted. How 
could they be? Let me file one exception. One 
time, when the Whigs had carried an election — 
perhaps in 1844, when there was a report that 
Clay had been elected President; possibly, four 
years later, when ''Old Zach'^ Taylor was elected 
— the Whigs ''illuminated." The illumination 
consisted in placing a large number of lighted 
candles in the windows; and the streets in front 
of the Whig houses where this unwonted glare 
confronted them, were for once, surprised into 
nocturnal visibility. This never happened but 

20 



once. There was nothing, indeed, wherewith the 
streets could be Hghted. For in that day John 
Rockefeller's ''light of the world" had not yet 
dawned on this benighted sphere, and our part 
of it had to grope, indoors and out, by the ob- 
scurity of the tallow candle. Petroleum was not 
known, except in name, even then and there. 
Once or twice a year an old man, driving a one- 
horse wagon, came through from Wirt county, 
peddling ''rock oil.'' It was reputed to be a 
sovereign remedy for rheumatism and kindred 
ailments, and its rank odor strongly recom- 
mended it; but it was not till many years later 
that Camden, and other Standard Oil princes, 
discovered that "rock oil" was a remedy for pov- 
erty, — that direst of all the ills that flesh is heir 
to. Could there have been anything prophetic 
in that name, "Rock ?" That this ill-smelling oil, 
exuding from the earth and collected from the 
Wirt county spring by spreading blankets on the 
water, was to become the vehicle for the greatest 
monopoly in the world, exacting from the people 
untold millions every year for one of the gifts 

21 



of nature; contributing, too, in its by-products 
in a thousand ways to the arts and sciences, those 
old people who used to buy a bottle from the 
Wirt county peddler could not have dreamed. 

EQUINE MANCHISE. 

In this municipal commonwealth the horse had 
a place of no mean privilege. In the streets, he 
was hitched to the fences. Emerson advises to 
"Hitch to a star." But nobody there had ever 
heard of Emerson. It may have been before he 
said it. Besides, hitching to a star — like Vega, 
for example — has its difficulties. Furthermore, 
not to mention that Emerson was a little trans- 
cendental, he was speaking of wagons, not 
horses. The whinnying horses, thus tied up to 
the fences, ''uneasy and confined from home," — 
as Pope says of the soul — rested and expatiated 
by gnawing the fence-boards, so that there were 
few whole fences on the streets; and thus grew 
many a breach through which some garden was 
given over to the ravage of old Dr. Fontleroy's 
swine, always alert to an opportunity. 

22 



Nobody found fault with all this. These were 
necessary ills growing out of the constitution of 
society that had to be borne. There was no bet- 
ter way. The modern product known as the 
"kicker'' had not at that time, in that place, been 
developed. 

EVENING UP. 

But let us concede that these humble people, 
who had so little and knew it not; who so little 
understood how to make the most of what they 
had; who could not live to behold the glory of 
this expanded era — are not by reason of all this 
to be contemned. They did as well as they knew 
—which is more than can be said for many of us 
who may fancy we are their betters. They were 
not especially to blame for any lack of knowl- 
edge, of experience or opportunity, nor for what 
we deem their insufficient enterprise. Every time 
has its ideals, its methods, its contentments. 
Happiest is he who accepts these as they come 
to him, who mingles his life with the life around 
him and accepts without apprenhension the inevi- 

23 



table translation into the great unknown. There 
was as much comity and fellowship among these 
good people — as much charity for each other's 
short-comings — as much cheerful submission to 
whatever poverty, hardship and limitation they 
had to meet — as can be found among an equal 
number anywhere today. They filled their little 
sphere the best they knew; they took cheerful 
views of life, though their's may seem to us so 
meager; and when they resigned the theater of 
action, they went to heaven (I am bound to be- 
lieve) by as ^direct a route as that taken by the 
multi-millionaire of the present day, who leaves 
so much money and so little love behind him. 

THEIR DAII^Y BREAD. 

The bread for the village and surrounding 
country was ground by an old mill on the river 
half a mile below, of primitive design and doubt- 
ful genealogy. It had been washed away and 
rebuilt, and from year to year so tinkered, 
altered, remodeled and amended that the original 
builder would never have recognized his off- 

24 



spring. In the matter of speed, as well as the 
fineness of product, it was like the ''mills of God/' 
Flour was not kept in the stores. Whoever 
wanted bread took the grain to the mill and 
brought away the flour. The farmers usually 
went to the mill with one or two led horses 
equipped with packsaddles. The miller took his 
pay in ''toll." This supplied bread for his own 
table and sometimes left him a little flour to sell. 
This old mill was in a chronic state of better- 
ment. Between the ravages of time and tide, 
the weather and natural wear and tear, there was 
always something about the mill or the dam that 
needed to be amended. Each miller had his own 
schemes for improvement; so that the hard- 
worked old structure was never in a quite com- 
plete, quiescent, perfectly workable shape. One 
miller after another was starved out. One was 
killed by falling through the floor among the 
wheels — and thereby hangs a tale. The miller 
was an old man, sexton of one of the churches 
in the village. The fatality occurred at mid-day ; 
and just about the time of its occurrence, as ap- 

25 



peared by subsequent comparison of time, the bell 
in the church-tower rang out a single peal. Peo- 
ple in the vicinity, hearing the stroke and seeing 
nobody about the church, went to the building, 
found the door locked, sent for the key and 
made a careful exploration of building and bell- 
tower. They found nobody nor anything to ex- 
plain the stroke of the bell; and the situation of 
the building and the immediate presence of the 
investigators made it impossible for any one to 
have left it without being seen. The circum- 
stances made a mystery that troubled believers 
in the occult for many a day and was never 
cleared up. 

ATTRACTIONS '^AROUND ABOUT.'' 

The view from the rounded hill that rose be- 
hind the village was extensive and pleasing. The 
eye ranged over a landscape of hill and river, 
farmland and woodland, embracing wide tracts 
of forest which then abounded in pheasant, rab- 
bits, quail, squirrels, raccoon, opossum and an 
occasional fox and wildcat. Sometimes a deer 

26 



would be driven in from more distant forests. 
The freedom of custom permitted the hunting 
of all kinds of game at any season. 

The thought of this landscape brings back rec- 
ollection of many a day spent by the writer in 
these woods with a rifle, not so much intent on 
the chase as under the spell of the . forest. The 
autumn was there an especially delightful season, 
the woods abounding in nuts and the wild blue- 
grape, and in the small game that subsisted on 
these. Winters were usually mild and spring be- 
gan early. There were times in January and 
February when there would be weeks together 
of mild bright weather without snow; when one 
could range the woods amid the rustling leaves 
and find squirrels nutting on the ground and 
pheasants in every cove drumming or feeding 
on the buds. O, the witchery of those sunny 
days in that friendly land! One could wish to 
be wild and turn his back forever on civilization 
to live always in such a hunters' paradise. Those 
who have entered into the spirit of such sur- 
roundings understand why Daniel Boone was 

27 



willing to live years by himself in the wilds of 
Kentucky, in hourly peril of his life, for the sake 
of the serene delights of the wild world around 
him. 

A love for the woods and all they embrace is 
a natural and not unhealthy appetite in man or 
boy. The association appeals to a deep-rooted 
instinct that may have come down to us from pri- 
meval ancestors who found homes and subsist- 
ence in the forest. The solitude and silence are 
stimulative of thought. They give a contempla- 
tive mood to the mind, steadiness to the nerves, 
stamina to the body, and put us in touch with 
the wild denizens who are well worthy of careful 
acquaintance. Time may be worse spent for a 
boy than in roaming the woods with a rifle, if 
he who carries it has any thoughts above the 
mere animal motive of the chase. It is a fallow 
season, advantageous to many a youth, who will 
show its mental enrichment in a stronger crop in 
later years. The mind that is in harmony with 
nature as there manifested, will not go far astray, 
for all her influences are corrective of whatever 
may be base in our own composition. 

28 



LIFE AMONG THE HILLS— DEBT OF 
THE CITY TO THE COUNTRY. 



NUGGETS, 



Looking backward now over the vanished half 
century, it is a long retrospective, the vista indis- 
tinct ; but as I dwell on it, the haze clears a little 
arrd figures that were familiar to my youthful 
acquaintance rise here and there into view. 

Isolation produces individuahty. The man is 
differentiated from the mass. In the rushing 
world, people are smoothed and rounded, as 
stones are on the ocean beach, by the attrition 
of the human currents that surge around them. 
In the stagnation of solitude, they take shape ac- 
cording to their idiosyncracies. Some old men 
I recall who were like moss-grown boulders that 
lie amid the hills, unchanged by sun or storm. 
They were rough, but only on the outside. The 
accretions of a solitary life had coated them with 

29 



singularity. They disdained the poHte affecta- 
tions of a more poHshed social regime, of which 
they had had but glimpses ; but under their rug- 
ged exterior they preserved a core of sweetness, 
as nuts do under the roughest shells. The in- 
tegral man was not the less worthy of esteem, 
nor indeed, the less attractive to those who would 
take the trouble to break through the shell, than 
if he had worn the fine cloth along with the fine 
manners which distinguish the mere man of the 
world, and had been accomplished in the graceful 
little deceptions and conventionalities that make 
up the currency of polite society. 

Men who live much alone are apt to be more 
original in thought than they who are in the 
whirl of the active world. The man in the world 
gets his ideas, as he does his garments, made to 
order according to the prevailing fashion. He 
has only to adopt them. He finds this less trou- 
ble than to think out questions for himself; for 
which, indeed, the pressure of the life he leads 
leaves him little time and less inclination. Not 
so with the philosopher among the hills, in the 

30 



■MMl 



seclusion of his fields and woods. What men 
may think from decade to decade, or from age to 
age, does not alter the immutable facts of exist- 
ence. The man sequestered confronts these as 
they come to him, and works out the problems 
of life in his own way. His isolation and mental 
leisure compel him. 

"Isolation," says one who gave much thought 
to the problems of the social world, "must pre- 
cede true society. I like," he says, "the silent 
church before the service begins better than the 
preaching. How far ofif, how cool, how chaste 
the persons look begirt each with a precinct or 
sanctuary." How remote and set apart, how 
sweet and old-fashioned, like blossoms in some 
old-time kitchen-garden, seem the long-vanished 
figures that remembrance brings back in the 
quaint framing of fifty years ago! They lived 
their own peaceful lives in their own unobtrusive 
way, as near happiness and fulfilling the true 
ends of existence as completely as if their lot 
had been cast in the hurly-burly of the great 
marts and gangways of the world ; as if their lei- 

31 



sure had been given to the pomp and ceremonial 
of official display, the flummeries and superficiali- 
ties, the hypocrisies, the unrest, the envy, the un- 
charitableness and hatreds that attend fashion- 
able life in great cities — once described by Wash- 
ington Irving as "the hurry and the bustle and 
the mighty nothingness of fashionable life" ; as 
if they had devoted each hour of existence, all 
the energies of nature, each hope of what ought 
to be an immortal soul, to the pursuit of wealth, 
the vanities of social ambition, the illusions of 
power, and had been rewarded at the point of 
highest success with only Dead-Sea fruit that 
turned to ashes on the lips. 

DEPKNDENCi: OF THE CITY. 

In the unobserved places of the earth, in the 
silence of the night, in the stillness of the day, 
broken only by the songs of birds and the lowing 
of kine, nature brings forth, season after season, 
the subsistence of the race. If this beneficent 
round should cease for but one season, famine 
and terror would seize all the centers of popula- 

32 



tion. It is by a like provision that the reserve 
supplies of those energies which make the earth 
a theater of action are grown and conserved in 
isolation and silence among the unconsidered 
people who dwell in the out-of-the-way places in 
every country. In the cities, where Tolstoi says 
''nothing is produced and where everything is 
swallowed up/' human life and energy continu- 
ally burn themselves out. New brawn, new 
brains, fresh nerve and vigor, new hope and con- 
fidence, are continuously being drawn from the 
obscurity of the country to find in the cities their 
field of exercise and achievement; and but for 
this continuous feed the population of the cities 
would become exhausted by sure processes of 
degeneration. 



33 



THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH. 



A RUGGED OU) VULCAN. 

It was in the year following the ''Tippecanoe and 
Tyler too'' campaign — which swept the 'Whigs 
into power, to be left a few months later ship- 
wrecked in mid-ocean with nothing to cling to 
but John Tyler, a Calhoun Democrat — that, at 
the tender age of four, my advent was made into 
this little village. I had heard a good deal about 
Log Cabins and Hard Cider, with only vague 
comprehension of what it all meant; but three 
years later, when "Polk, Dallas and Texas'' came 
into the arena, I was a full-fledged Whig; and, 
though Henry Clay never knew it, he had not a 
more ardent supporter in the land, nor one who 
suffered keener disappointment over his defeat. 

One of the first old men in the place I came to 
know was a blacksmith, who lived on the farther 
side of the block, his smithy near his house, 

34 



which was a story and a half log structure with 
^ frame addition at one end — about as cheerless 
and wretchedly furnished as a human habitation 
could well be. This old man's name had a middle 
initial ' W ; and, singularly, it had become the 
fashion in the village to speak of him as "Old 
W." It was a long time before I knew he had 
another name, which we may suppose to be 
Jones. He was poor, perhaps without realizing 
it ; for poverty and wealth are merely relative and 
largely a condition of mind. Some of the poor- 
est people I have ever known, as rated in the cur- 
rency of the realm, were in truth the richest, 
while others who had uncounted dollars were 
among the greatest moral and intellectual pau- 
pers on earth. Whether we are to consider Mr. 
Jones rich or poor, he had the usual accompani- 
ment of poverty, a numerous family. He had in 
middle life married a young woman in the vil- 
lage, and they had acquired a half dozen boys 
and one girl, ranging from my age both ways. 
The old man was crippled with rheumatism and 
limped with the help of a hickory cane. Herein 

35 



he resembled the original Vulcan, whom the 
Greeks represented as lame. He was habitually 
grimy of hands and face, and the garments he 
wore were of undefined texture and color. He 
had a strongly marked face, upon which time 
and rheumatic twinges — assisted it may be by 
business anxieties — had left their imprint. He 
was sometimes harsh with his own children, but 
that may have come from the bitterness , of con- 
templating conditions he was powerless to mend. 
He was kind to other boys about his shop and 
always made me welcome. A blacksmith shop 
is not a bad place for a youngster to take his 
first observations of the work-day world. The 
work of a blacksmith is very curious and inter- 
esting to a child. A little chap who came along 
by such a shop one day when a horse was being 
shod, and lingered to witness other operations, 
reported when he went home that among the won- 
/derful things that blacksmith did he made horses, 
because he had seen him ^'just finishing one up 
by putting iron shoes on him." The bellows, the 
forge, the tongs, the hammers, the sonorous 

36 



ring of the anvil; the showers of sparks that 
flv from the white-hot metal — these are things 
that are hard to match in the first experiences 
of a small boy. There was a tradition in the 
village that ''Old W/' had invented and rigged 
a ''trip-hammer'' to be manipulated by a treadle, 
to do the striking for him when he had large 
irons to forge; but this mechanical triumph I 
never saw at work. 

A BIT 01^ J^INESSE. 

I don't think I ever saw the old blacksmith 
smile. Perhaps he had forgotten how. For him 
life had grown to be a matter of habitual gravity. 
Yet there was a certain resolute cheerfulness — 
an acceptance of the situation, hard as it was — 
about him that would atone for many short-com- 
ings. When work was slack, and the larder 
probably low, he would rise before daylight, blow 
up a fire in the forge and make the anvil ring 
till it could be heard from hill to river. People 
w^ould hear this in their beds, and it suggested 
to them that "Old W.'' was busy and prosperous ; 

37 



and then, after breakfast they would scurry 
around to see if they could not find some work 
they wanted him to do. For everybody wants 
to help a prosperous man and to crowd a busy 
one. "To him that hath shall be given." This 
wise old man, in his obscurity and poverty, un- 
derstood a bit of human nature and a bit of phi- 
losophy quite as well as the city merchant or 
promoter making his spread to catch the popular 
breeze. 

ANOTHER BRANCH O^ BUSINESS. 

Two undeniable weaknesses the old blacksmith 
had. One was a liking for a little whiskey, the 
other a fondness for fishing'. But the fishing was 
excused by the necessities of subsistence. Peo- 
ple must eat, even though they do live in 
wretched houses and be poorly clad. Work was 
slack at times, and the bank balance, at all times 
slender, in these emergencies wholly disappeared. 
The fishery, there is reason to fear, was at times 
the mainstay of the household. In the matter of 
drink, the blacksmith was not given to excesses. 

38 



He did not frequent the tavern, but he had a 
small stone jug in which he kept a little bait that 
was not for the fish but was useful in cases of 
''fisherman's luck" — which even the most skillful 
devotee of Walton cannot always escape. 

F^ISH AND P^ISHING. 

The river which ran at the foot of the village 
streets was in that early day pretty well stocked. 
The wall-eyed pike was the big prize, seldom 
drawn. Few boys had lines that would hold one. 
The black bass (we knew it as ''perch") was our 
chief pursuit. The cat-fish ("blue" and "mud") ; 
the small sun-fish; sometimes a "buffalo," were 
other varieties. There was also the sucker tribe, 
chief of which was the "red-fin" or ''glut," thus 
named for the color of its fins and wedge-like 
shape. A wooden wedge (used by woodsmen 
for splitting logs) is a "glut." In the spring, 
both pike and red-fin might be "gigged" on the 
riffles. The "gig" was a three-pronged barbed 
spear, not unlike the alleged tripod of Neptune. 
The expert could throw it and kill the fish at 

39 



considerable distances. The red-fin was some- 
times twenty inches or more long. The flesh 
was sweet and free from small bones. It was a 
better fish than the pike, much as that was prized. 
But the red-fin could be taken only in spawning 
time; and the slaughter of them at that season 
finally exterminated the species. The bl^^.k-bass 
also were destroyed by shooting the females in 
summer when protecting their spawn in the shal- 
lows along the shore. 

There were some deep pools in the river where 
we boys were accustomed to fish for bass and 
pike, though most of our fishing was done early 
in the spring in the swift water below the mill- 
dam, where a boy once caught a bass that meas- 
ured twenty-four inches. A brother of the 
writer, when just a little fellow, once had a per- 
sonal encounter with a large pike that left him 
with a pretty badly mangled hand. The line 
parted just when he had landed the fish on the 
sand. To keep it from getting back he jumped 
on it, and as John Phoenix would say, "inserted'' 
his hand in its mouth. He had never caught a 

40 



pike before and ''didn't know it was loaded/' 
But he saved the fish. 

The cat-fish were to be caught only in the slug- 
gish water of the pools. The accepted method 
was the /'trot-line.'' This was a strong line, 
usually stretched across the river, to which at 
short intervals were attached "stages'' carrying 
hook and bait. The hooks were baited with min- 
nows, frogs, young birds or bits of raw meat. 
The cat-fish were not dainty; they objected to 
nothing that was edible. The lines were usually 
laid out in the evening and visited next morning. 
A swell in the river was favorable. Muddy 
water ^seemed to sharpen the hunger of the cat- 
fish. At least it made him bolder in hunting for 
his supper. When the catch was good, lifting a 
trot-line was no mean sport. Sometimes the cap- 
tive fish would break water half way across the 
river; and the apprehension that they might get 
away before they could be reached afforded a 
tension of the nerves exciting enough for even 
such a matter-of-fact fisherman as our ancient 
friend, the blacksmith. This was the kind of 

41 



fishing he gave himself to when the shop was 
idle. 

CATCHING THE BAIT. 

A small stream called Shehan's Run passed 
through the border of the village and joined the 
river, after performing its tasks on an old mill- 
wheel, referred to elsewhere. In this Run were 
certain ''minnow-holes" where we depended on 
catching bait. Seldom did we repair to these, 
with fly-hook and bucket, that we did not find 
''Old W." ahead of us. He was a believer in 
the proverb about the early bird. While we were 
still enjoying the sleep of the just, he would have 
risen at daylight, have visited his ''trot-line," 
eaten his breakfast, dug his cup of worms, and 
limped half a mile up the Run to the best "min- 
now-hole," where we would find him with the 
biggest minnows already in his bucket. The old 
man had a number of little fads about fishing. 
It spoiled the luck to swear. This was funda- 
mental. And come to think, I don't remember 
ever to have heard the old blacksmith swear. 

42 



Whatever his faults, profanity was not one of 
them. He always spat on the worm to make it 
enticing to the minnow ; and seeing that he 
chewed tobacco, I was a disbeliever in this ex- 
pedient. Then he always had a little ball of asa- 
foetida hung to a thread around his neck. This 
was carried as a general prophylactic; but when 
the minnows refused tobacco sauce, he would rub 
a little of the asafoetida on the hook; and then 
(he believed) the fish fell over each other to get 
to the bait. But I always held in this matter to 
the private conviction that this was a supersti- 
tion and. that the minnows, on the contrary, ran 
away and hid under the farthest rock. 

TURTLE SOUP. 

It would be an unlucky morning if "Old W." 
did not, in the fishing season, bring home at least 
one good cat-fish. At times he would have a big 
snapping turtle; for these abounded and were 
prone to take the bait. Then the menu on the 
Jones board would be graced with real turtle 
soup, besides all the variety of meat the turtle is 

43 



reputed to provide. From time to time Mr. 
Jones would take up the ''trot-lines'' and string 
them around on his garden fence to dry, having 
a theor}^ that if not dried occasionally they would 
rot. 

EMIGRATION— GIVING UP THE CAT-:F^ISH. 

Thus the years went by; and our old friend, 
as time and rheumatism tightened their grip on 
him, fell more and more away from the shop 
and grew more and more confirmed in the pur- 
suit of the aquatic game. But time was brewing 
a change. It was bringing the boys around to an 
age when they began to feel the stirrings of 
young manhood and a desire to better their con- 
dition. So amongst them one day they discov- 
ered that a little farm a few miles away over the 
hills, in the valley of Bingen, could be. leased on 
advantageous terms, while the neighborhood 
needed a blacksmith. A reluctant consent was at 
last wrung from the old man; and so the rock- 
rooted and moss-grown Jones family collected 
their few belongings, let the old log-house, aban- 

44 



doned the shop — which had already acquired a 
very abandoned aspect — and the head of the fam- 
ily almost tearfully forswearing the cat-fish, they 
went to the farm. 

A few times ''Old W." came back to the vil- 
lage, more clean and cheerful than any remem- 
bered ever to have seen him. So all were ready 
to bless the dispensation which had led to the mi- 
gration. 

Dear, dirty old disciple of Vulcan and Isaac 
Walton! He has taught me lessons in patience 
and courage under hardship worthy of all emula- 
tion. For many a year he has been at rest in the 
vale of Bingen, which welcomed him with the 
last hospitality of earth. The world to him was 
narrow and unkind. His life was a struggle for 
the needs of a bare existence. If he ever felt the 
pangs that come with aspirations for ''something 
better than he had known," he gave no sign. He 
knew nothing of the greater world, nor it any- 
thing of him; and by neither will the other be 
missed to all eternity. 



45 



THE OLD WHEELWRIGHT AND 
FERRYMAN. 



HIS IvATHE AND ITS WORK. 

A place I liked to visit was the shop of an old 
wheelwright, Eusebius Starke. The most inter- 
esting thing about the shop was the lathe. It 
was a crude affair (I know now), run by tramp- 
ing a wooden bar rigged to a big solid wooden 
wheel, which served both to communicate mo- 
tion and to store power as a fly-wheel. Such a 
lathe in a modern shop would hardly receive the 
respect due to old rubbish; but in this old log 
shop, to my unacqustomed eye and limitless 
ignorance, it was a wonderful machine. The 
shavings would spin away, under the chisel like 
ribbons, and forms of grace grow out of sense- 
less blocks and posts in a way to make one feel 
as if they were alive. Sometimes, when a job 
was finished, Mr. Starke would put in a small 

46 



block and in few minutes take out and hand me 
a pretty top. This did not make the work less 
attractive. He would turn up sets of wooden 
bed-posts with fanciful swells and curves that 
seemed to me the perfection of art. These were 
usually made of ''poplar" — really the tulip-pop- 
lar — a large tree bearing a flower like a tulip that 
grows luxuriantly, in that region and takes the 
place in carpentry and cabinet-work that pine 
does farther north. Sometimes they would be 
turned out of wild cherry, which in that latitude 
is also a large tree. These bedsteads would be 
stained with a preparation of logwood and cochi- 
neal ; and when they had been varnished to bring 
out the brilliant red, the rustic customer looking 
for sleeping furniture would have an obdurate 
heart if they did not capture it. 

SPINNING-WHEELS AND THEIR USE. 

Few now-a-days are familiar with the homely 
industries which made a demand for the old- 
fashioned spinning-wheels such as our grand- 
mothers and theirs used for spinning flax and 

47 



wool. The home-grown flax was first rotted in 
the field, then broken on a ''flax-break"; then 
''heckled" on a bench set with sharp spikes. The 
product was of two grades, one called "tow," the 
other the clean fiber fit for spinning into linen 
thread. This work I used to see at my grand- 
father's. He in summer was always clad in a 
full suit, including shirt, of this home-made 
linen, rough but clean-looking and serviceable, 
bleaching as washed until it became white. 

The small wheel at which the spinner sat, pro- 
pelled by treadle, crank and band, was for flax. 
The larger wheel was for wool. The wool was 
carefully picked loose and fluffy, cleaned of for- 
eign substances; then sent to a carding-machine 
(usually in that country operated in connection 
with a grist-mill), by which it was converted into 
"rolls," about as large in diameter as a tallow 
candle and perhaps twenty inches long. These 
were laid beside the spinner, who attaching one 
to the spindle would give the wheel a whirl with 
the finger (sometimes a \Vooden finger) and 
walking backwards holding the roll in the left 

48 



hand would draw it out as the motion of the 
spindle twisted it into yarn. The yarn by re- 
verse motion of the wheel wopld be wound back 
on the spindle, another roll attached to the un- 
spun end of the first — and so on hour after hour. 
When the spindle had been filled, the yarn was 
wound off on a ''reel," and when this was full 
taken off in ''hanks'' or wrapped in balls if for 
knitting. The home-made "jeans" into which 
this yarn was woven on hand looms was a warm 
and substantial cloth, dyed blue or "butternut," 
and was the standard winter garb of well-to-do 
farmers. 

CO^^IN-MAKING. 

There was enough of this wheel and bedstead 
work to keep the wolf from the door of the 
Starke household through the years it was kept 
together, supplemented by the revenue from the 
ferry and the making of coffins; for Mr. Starke 
was also the ferryman and the coffin-maker 
(though not undertaker) for the neighborhood. 
Coffins were made of black-walnut or wild-cherry 

49 



carefully dressed and finished with a coating of 
beeswax melted on with a hot smoothing-iron 
and rubbed to a polish. No coffins were kept on 
hand. When a death occurred, the measure was 
brought to Mr. Starke on a scion cut from a 
thicket showing the length of the corpse ; and 
the length determined the dimensions and shape 
of the coffin ; the making of which was an emer- 
gency job and pushed with vigor. Nothing was 
allowed to interfere with it except calls to the 
ferry. The prices charged for coffins were so 
miodest I refrain from mention, out of considera- 
tion for the feelings of some modern undertaker 
who might chance to see this page. 

THE FERRY. 

The river was little more than a block away 
from the shop — and the blocks in this village 
were not long. The "Whoo-ee !" of the passen- 
ger wanting to be ferried easily crossed the 
space, and the ferryman's ear had been so trained 
to listen for the call that it rarely had to be re- 
peated, even if the lathe were running — and it 

50 



must be admitted, wonderful a machine as that 
lathe was, it made a tremendous racket. The 
river was two to three hundred feet wide and 
flowed between high banks. In summer it was 
often so shallow pedestrians could step across on 
the stones. In times of freshet, it was deep and 
swift and made the service hazardous. The ferry 
equipment consisted of a substantial skiff and a 
flat-bottomed low-gunwaled boat with sloping 
ends, large enough to take in a team and leave 
room on each side for the ferryman to walk be- 
side the gunwale as he poled the boat across with 
a spike-pole set on the bottom. These boats were 
built by the ferryman, and repaired or rebuilt 
when required. When the river was very deep, 
the pole would not reach bottom and oars had 
to be employed. In such floods the ferrying of 
teams was highly dangerous ; but our old Charon 
w^as exceedingly skillful, and no serious mishap 
ever occurred. Some years later, he stretched 
a cable across the river, which made the handling 
of the larger boat easier and safer. A little fur- 
ther along, he was able to build himself a dwell- 

51 



ing and shop near the river bluff; but about the 
time he had fixed himself to do the work com- 
fortably he was granted that long furlough which 
comes to us all at last, . and is never quite wel- 
come when it arrives. 

old-time: j^armer. 

Mr. Starke'.s first wife was the daughter of an 
old soldier of the Revolution, of German nativ- 
ity, who lived a few miles distant. I sometimes 
saw him and was afraid of him, for no reason 
except that he was a stranger, oddly dressed, 
had a seamed and rough-looking face, and had 
a name which by slight alteration we converted 
into "Scratcher'^ ; which, again, with the facility 
of childish imagination, we associated with the 
^'Old Scratch" — and this terrified us. This ven- 
erable German had very marked eccentricities 
from the standpoint of his American neighbors. 
But he was thoroughly honest, attended strictly 
to his own business and did not meddle with 
anybody else's. He was a man of elevated moral 
attributes, a model farmer and a reader of the 

52 



scanty literature of the time. I am even today 
possessed of some of his old newspapers printed 
at Morgantown dating back to the beginning 
of the century. He kept a systetn of farm ac- 
counts with stock and fields, noting when each 
crop was put in, the weather, the phase of the 
moon, and ultimately the outcome of the ven- 
ture. He usually sowed his wheat very late, 
sometimes in December; and it was a stock joke 
among his neighbors that the Almighty had ''to 
postpone the w^inter till old L. K. had got his 
wheat in.'' 

UTERARY RESEARCHES. 

The youngest Starke girl was about my age; 
and before her mother's death, while we were 
mere children, I was a good deal at their house, 
and remember that a favorite means of enter- 
tainment for us two was to get down from the 
book-case a copy of ''Fox's Book of Martyrs" 
and pore over the pictures showing the ingenious 
horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. This girl 
later was the best speller at school; and in the 

53 



spelling matches the victory was often contested 
between her and a daughter of the old English 
shoemaker mentioned in another place. Poor 
girl, she married and has been dead these twenty 
years, and is to me now only a fragrant memory. 
Around their garden fence was a fringe of 
currant-bushes that every summer distilled the 
finest red currants. The eldest daughter, who 
had charge of the household after her mother's 
death, used to invite me summer afternoons to 
make myself at home among those currant- 
bushes. More than thirty years later, a chance 
business errand took me to central Missouri, 
where, in the wilderness of the Ozarks, I spent 
a day or two in the home of this same daughter, 
with children and young grand-children about 
her, but still a young woman, with that delight- 
ful youth of soul that some never lose, preserv- 
ing a loving recollection of the old times and 
friends that no years or distance or misfortune 
could abate. 



54 



AN ABORIGINAL MEDICINE MAN 
BECOMES CIVILIZED. 



HIS WIGWAM AND RESERVATION. 

On the farther side of the river, over against 
the ferry, lay the demesne of an old resident of 
strong-ly marked individuality who merits a place 
in this veracious history. He used to give the 
ferryman a good many bad quarter-hours be- 
cause he kept a boat and ferried not only his 
own numerous "family, as he had a right to do, 
but permitted a good many others to use his boat 
to the diminution of the ferryman's lawful reve- 
nues. Dr. Fontleroy owned a few rough unpro- 
ductive acres, mostly hollows and banks, from 
the river back, in a narrow strip, near half a 
mile. He lived, in early days, in a low story- 
and-loft log house with an uncovered porch 
along the front, on a sort of terrace under the 
main river bluff where it rounded to let a brook 

55 



come down to the river, in a style of Arcadian 
simplicity and poverty. Near one end of the 
house was a collection of bee-stands. The bees 
recognized the Doctor as master, for he could 
do anything he pleased with fhem — scoop them 
up and carry them around in his hands, as if 
they had been sand or brown sugar, when they 
swarmed or when he wanted to move them— 
and they did not resent it. But let a civilized 
boy come within ten yards of the hives, and there 
was instant declaration of war. 

Along the margin of the river and in the pools 
of the brook which came down the hollow, geese 
nibbled the scanty grass or paddled in the water. 
Around the impoverished acres, nearly every- 
where and at any time, could be seen razor-back 
old sows or shoats trying to pick a living from 
the poverty-stricken field, in which the grass 
was always eaten down to the roots. A few 
scrawny, unfed cows contested with the pigs and 
geese for the scanty herbage around these points 
and banks. The geese and hogs, having the in- 
stinct of self-preservation largely developed, 

56 



often crossed the river and sought in the vil- 
lage the living they were not able to find at 
home. Numbers of geese took up their perma- 
nent abode in the town. They nested under the 
old church, and when the goslings came out they 
were marched to the river for their first lesson. 
This new feathered generation were like the 
king that ''knew not Joseph.'' They knew noth- 
ing of the Doctor, and never sought the patri- 
monial acres unless under compulsion at pick- 
ing time. Many a garden was looted at night 
by the marauding swine. These porcine Co- 
manches, with the fine instinct of their tribe, 
left the scene of their depredations and were 
back on their own side of the river before day- 
light revealed the ruin they had wrought. 

When Sancho Panza was being coached how 
to deport himself when he should have become 
Governor of his 'Tsland/' he was reminded, as 
a check to his pride, that he had once ''kept 
swine." Sancho, in self-vindication, replied that 
this was when he was a boy, and that when he 
became older he "looked after geese." It is a 

57 



nice distinction, but evidently in the seventeenth 
century, in the most civilized country in Europe, 
the swine were regarded as a disreputable lot. 
Ably did old Doctor Fontleroy's hogs maintain 
the ancient reputation. 

A STOIKING PERSONALITY. 

Such was the general aspect of Dr. Fontleroy's 
home and estate for many years. He was a 
widower vvith sons and daughters, wedded to his 
studies of medicine, philosophy and theology. 
He himself fitted well into his surroundings. He 
had a personality that would have befitted Job, 
and a patience in his voluntary poverty that 
would not have discredited the ancient Patriarch ; 
fine high features, a benignant eye, a native dig- 
nity and a sort of unconscious grandeur that no 
dilapidation of dress could degrade, which told 
that he was conscious of being on terms of equal- 
ity with the best of creation. In his profession, 
he was of the Thompsonian school and dispensed 
liberally to all comers the limited pharmacopoeia 
it prescribed — lobelia and ''composition." If 

58 



there were sometimes cases beyond the reach of 
these remedies, that was the misfortune of the 
patient, not the fault of the system. There was 
nothing- contracted in his moral or intellectual 
make-up ; and there was a lofty serenity about 
him which the devotees of the fashionable world 
often strive in vain to acquire. He had the gift 
of fluent speech, and could discourse interest- 
ingly and learnedly on religious, medical or phi- 
losophical topics. As to the affairs of his little 
farm, while not a stoic he was too much of a phi- 
losopher to give himself much concern about 
such merely material anxieties as whether his 
stock had feed, whether his rough acres were 
cropped, or his children clothed; whether the 
roof leaked, or there was anything in the house 
to eat. To all appearance the cares of life sat 
as lightly on him as if he had been endowed with 
a generous income and surrounded with abun- 
dance. 

BUILDS A NEW HOUSE. 

After a time — a long time — Dr. Fontleroy de- 
termined to build a better house — not that he 

59 



himself needed or cared for one, but others of 
the family did. It should be of brick, for the 
making of which he had the raw material in 
abundance. So he installed a brick-yard, and 
with the assistance of his boys and of his old 
horse, "Greaser" (almost as unique a character 
as his master), the making of brick progressed 
for two or three summers. How many times the 
adobes were by rain or frost returned to the 
original form, I could not now venture to say; 
but at last the kiln was laid, the brick burned, 
and — not to dwell on these long periods — the 
house was started. Memory refuses to affirm 
how long it took to lay up the walls; but at 
times it looked as if Macauley's New Zealander 
might come and meditate over the ruin. The 
bricklayer was a man after the Doctor's own 
heart. He was never known to be in a hurry, 
nor to lay a brick till he had first swept the 
horizon with a scrutinizing glance. I fancy he 
spent his life in constant expectation of seeing 
his ships come in, and was always on the look- 
out. One reason why they never came into port 

60 



was that the smoke always went out at the wrong 
end of his chimneys. 

There is an end to all things, except time — 
and even that is promised (in the book of Rev- 
elations, I believe). At last the walls had risen 
to the eaves, the roof was put on, a few rooms 
were closed with doors and windows and the 
family moved in. Time went on, but the work 
on the house did not. On the estate there was 
the same unvarying round. Cattle died from in- 
nutrition and other generations took their place. 
''Greaser" and the pigs and geese held on. But 
a change was brewing; a change that had per- 
haps been brewing longer than many knew. It 
was believed the Doctor had for some time been 
paying court to an admirable woman, a widow, 
of some means and much force of character, 
whose home was in the valley of Bingen; that 
she would not listen to his suit until he had a 
better house, and that this new brick mansion 
was the fruit of a compact. Doubtless both came 
to realize that left to himself the Doctor never 
would get the house finished, and so she married 

61 



him partly in self-defense, partly perhaps out of 
compassion for the Doctor and others who 
needed her help. The scepter at once passed into 
stronger hands, and a different rule began. The 
children were better clothed, the house put into 
habitable condition; the cows fed, the pigs con- 
fined as far as possible and sometimes one made 
fat enough for slaughter; the geese gathered 
homie and plucked; and an air of cleanliness and 
thrift gradually supplanted the neglect and 
squalor that had reigned undisputed for so many 
years. The Doctor himself was taken in hand 
and furbished up into the elegant looking old 
gentleman nature had intended him for. All this 
took time, which is a mighty element in the 
world's progress ; but time never disturbed the 
Doctor's serenity; nor did eternity, I venture to 
believe, when it finally came around to him. 

CONSERVATIVE NEIGHBORS. 

Adjoining Dr. Fontleroy's demesne was a 
large landed estate held by two brothers who 

62 



were old men as far back as anybody could re- 
member. They held between them more than a 
thousand acres, much of it in virgin forest. A 
^ood deal of this woodland lay along the river, 
and no such body of fine white-oak remained in 
that section. The oaks were valuable for steam- 
boat timber ; but the old men, though often solic- 
ited, refused to sell a tree. Year after year the 
destruction by storm and decay went on; but it 
was against the family traditions to allow any 
timber to go oflf the place, so the loss was irre- 
mediable. The only person, it was said, who 
was ever able to make anything out of these con- 
servative old brothers was our good friend Dr. 
Fontleroy. ''Greaser" and the razor-backs were 
perpetual tenants-at-will in their fifty-acre field, 
w^hich adjoined the Doctor's estate; for no fence 
capable of excluding these expert trespassers had 
yet in that day and region been devised. 

Poor Old Greaser, of whom I have many 
pleasing recollections ! I cannot resign him to 
dumb forgetfulness without recording that in his 

63 



old age — when by reason not alone of his years 
but of his civic virtues and faithful service 
through decades of hardship, he should have 
been exempt from military duty — he was cap- 
tured by the Confederate raiders who under 
Jones passed up that valley in April, 1863, and 
was pressed, reluctant, into the service of the 
Lost Cause. Such a thing could not have hap- 
pened had the veteran been upon his native 
heath; but he was under saddle and bridle, some 
miles away, and was taken at a disadvantage. 
But I know that whatever befell him he was, like 
Eugene Aram, ''equal to any fate." Pax vohis- 
cum oleaginus equinus! 



64 



A QUAINT OLD ROMANCER 



SAMPI.E OF^ HIS WARES. 

Half a mile out of the village lived in comfort 
on his own farm Salathiel Carnes, another unique 
character who filled a large place in my youthful 
experiences. He was well along past middle life, 
of little culture but great good nature, garrulous 
and given to story telling. His inventions were 
of too flimsy a texture to bear exhibition on paper, 
even if they could be recalled. Two samples will 
give an idea of them. 

Mr. Carnes had once lived at Wooster, Ohio; 
and most of his remarkable experiences, as re- 
lated in after life, occurred at that place. He 
used to tell (to small boys) about an enormous 
bank at Wooster the door of which was secured 
by a lock so powerful that the key could be 
turned by means only of a ''hand-spike'' thrust 

65 



through the ring of the handle; and when the 
bolt was thrown, so mighty was the spring that 
this lever was liable to knock down anything that 
chanced to be within its sweep ; and, if we might 
credit his recital, a number of persons were killed 
in locking and unlocking this bank door. The 
evil got to be so serious that it became necessary 
to devise a different fastening. 

A barn was once built in Wooster of great 
hewed logs, which, to make the barn warm and 
rat-proof,^ were tongued and grooved after the 
manner of flooring boards. To efifect'this, great 
tongue-and-grooved planes had to be specially 
manufactured ; and when these were used on the 
face of the timbers, they were drawn by several 
yoke of oxen, and it took half a dozen men to 
hold the plane. Several fatal accidents occurred 
during the progress of this barn-building. As the 
ox-power was a little unsteady at times, the plane 
was liable to slip off and crush the men operating 
it. This story also was reserved for very youth- 
ful audiences. 

66 



A COMFORTABLE PHILOSOPHY. 

Mr. Carnes, in his way, was something of a 
philosopher. He did not see why one should kill 
himself to live — a proposition that may be com- 
mended to all mankind. While careful with what 
he had, wasting nothing, he had no appetite for 
mere acquisition. He lived for the sake of living, 
according to his ideal. A little work, a good deal 
of puttering about, a little social exchange of an- 
ecdote and reminiscence, sufficed for his daily 
needs. He was content to let the present take 
care of itself and never worried about the future. 
Least of all was he moved by any disposition to 
incommode himself for the sake of increasing his 
possessions. His wants were few and simple, 
and he had enough. What could be better? He 
raised the crops needed for his horses, cows and 
pigs. He had flocks of fowl which supplied his 
table with meat and drink, for the surplus of their 
eggs more than bought the tea and coffee. 

HENS AND ROMANCES. 

Around and about his porches and stairs, in 
nooks and corners, even on plain walls, were 

67 



boxes with nests in them for his hens ; and the 
hens conformed to his scheme and laid their 
eggs where it was most convenient for him to 
gather them. The marketing of these eggs was 
a privilege Mr. Carnes would have been loath to 
forego; for it afforded him a legitimate excuse 
to visit the village and linger awhile in the stores, 
after the commercial exchange had been com- 
pleted, to exchange his intellectual currency for 
that of other citizens of leisure and reminiscent 
inclinations always to be found in such centers of 
intelligence. Whether on the boxes outside, in 
summer, or on the same boxes inside, in winter, 
they were always ready to listen to Mr. Carnes' 
''yarns" and he equally ready to meet the de- 
mand ; and thus was many an idyllic hour gilded 
with the old gold of romance, to their mutual 
entertainment, while in the far-away world less 
favored mortals were being ground under the 
juggernaut of business and worldly cares. 

APPIvE^S AND AUDITORS. 

Mr. Carnes had about his farm a number of 
things that appealed strongly to the appreciation 

68 



of a boy. He had two orchards of apples, and 
rows of peach trees along his fences. There were 
apples ripening in every month from July till 
winter. These fell and rotted in the grass under 
the trees for lack of somebody to eat them. Mr. 
Carnes' own family was small. The village 
afforded no market; for there were too many 
convenient orchards where apples could be had 
for the carrying away to make any other demand. 
But Mr. Carnes did not seek to make any money 
out of his abundance. He was generous, and 
somewhat open to the flattery of deference — as, 
indeed, who is not? All he asked was that when 
we boys wanted apples we would come to the 
house and ask for them. This formality we 
usually complied with. But not always. After 
a time it came to be understood Mr. Carnes 
wanted only to tell us a lot of his stories ; and 
after we had been through the catalogue several 
times the repetition became tiresome. Besides, it 
was not a reasonable arrangement. Apples first 
and stories afterward, would have been more in 
the order of nature and of good dietetics. 

69 



A I^KW PECUUARITIES. 

Mr. Carnes had good gates of his own build- 
ing all over his farm, sometimes where there was 
little use or excuse for them. They were equipped 
with elaborate hickory latches, and in places 
where people were liable to ride 'had handles and 
levers attached so the horseman could let himself 
through without dismounting. 

He kept bees near the house, and to keep out 
the moth built a glass ''palace" to enclose all the 
hives, with .small openings for the bees which it 
was expected the moth would not have the wit 
to discover. 

At the north front of the house he kept a 
thermometer ; and w^hen he had a caller never 
failed to consult it as a contribution to the com- 
fort of the visitor, who would, of course, know 
better how to adapt himself to the temperature 
if he knew precisely what it was. 

The exhibition of little things like these was 
accompanied by a recital of their biography; so 
that the defenseless visitor was entertained, in 

70 



spite of himself, with a series of illustrated lec- 
tures more or less interesting. 

Through some freak or accident of inherit- 
ance, he had come into possession of an old vel- 
lum-covered copy of Pope's translation of the 
Iliad; and this he lent to anybody who would 
accept the loan of it. He had never read it him- 
self and found few to borrow. The little I ever 
knew about Troy and the Trojans w^as derived 
from this old book. 

Mr. Carnes in religion was of the Universalist 
faith. In order to keep abreast of the times in 
his denomination, he subscribed to the "Star in 
the West," a weekly published at Cincinnati. 
This paper arrived at the village post-office Sat- 
urdays ; and, never failing, rain or shine, winter 
or summer, within an hour after the arrival of 
the mail, Mr. Carnes presented himself for his 
copy of the ''Star." He took pride in allowing 
it to be known that he subscribed for it and liked 
to dilate on the fine quality of the paper and the 
large, beautiful print; but for himself he never 
read a line in it. He took the paper home and 

71 



laid it away; and, when he could lead the con- 
versation up to it, he would show the visitor 
stacks of these ''Stars in the West/' running back 
through years, all printed on fine white paper, 
in large clear type, laid away as methodically as 
if they had been title-deeds to his farm. 

THE ICK-COLD SPRING. 

Within seventy-five feet of the house, down 
stone steps, in a deeply-shaded little cove, an ice- 
cold spring came out of the hill and spread itself 
over the stone floor of the milk-house a few feet 
away, refrigerating spotless pans of milk and 
crocks of golden cream and butter; for Mr. 
Carnes' daughter was as accomplished in her 
dairying as he in his romancing. The water as 
it came from the rock made the teeth ache. It 
was always the same, winter and summer, and a 
drink from the gourd at this spring for a glow- 
ing, thirsty boy on a hot summer day, is a mem- 
ory to be cherished for a lifetime. 

THE BLACKBERRY F^IEI^DS. 

Divers fields of the Carnes farm were given 
up to blackberries. There was more pasturage 
than really needed, and it involved a good deal 

72 



of work to keep the briers down ; for in that gen- 
erous soil and with that kindly climate, nature 
was bountiful. Mr. Carnes could not see why 
her generous purposes should be thwarted when 
there was no need. So in these fields he let her 
have her way and made us sharers in her munifi- 
cence. Sometimes at the bars where we entered 
a field, hoes would be placed, which (Mr. Carnes 
would explain) we were authorized to use for 
cutting paths into otherwise inaccessible places, 
where — such is the cunning of nature — the 
most luscious berries were in concealment. At 
one time we were base enough to suspect this a 
shrewd device to beguile us into helping Mr. 
Carnes cut down the briers ; but as the seasons 
passed and the rest of them were undisturbed, we 
dismissed the unworthy suspicion. 

Never anywhere since, in all seriousness, have 
I encountered any such blackberries as grew in 
those Carnes fields, under his benign patronage 
and the smiles of those Virginia skies ; nor for 
that matter, such apples as ripened in those or- 
chards and waited in the grass under the trees for 
idle, hungry boys to come and eat them. Maybe 
this is the gilding of fancy, which exalts and 

73 



beautifies all the things that pertained to our 
youth. It was the old Greek fancy which made 
the trees in the Hesperides bear apples of pure 
gold. I don't know why the modern imagination 
should be poorer than that of the ancient Hel- 
enese. 



''cherry ripe/' 



Mr. Games' taste did not run to cherries — 
though ours did. But we knew where to look 
for these. The farm of "Old Jakey" Games, a 
little farther from the village in another direc- 
tion, offered^ its tribute in the form of cherries. 
Just inside the rail fence beside the road that led 
to Uncle Brodie's stood a row of large murillo 
cherry trees. The family were accustomed to 
gather their supply early ; and it v/as given out 
that thereafter the birds and the boys could have 
the rest, provided they did not break the limbs. 
I doubt if the birds ever got their fair share. 

Let us, as we pass along, render unto Gsesar his 
own. Gonsider the far-reaching benevolence 
of the ''fanatic," as Emerson chooses to call him, 
'Svho plants shade trees for the second and third 

74 



generations and orchards when he has grown 
old." Here was one who, planting for a genera- 
tion he was never to see, set cherrv trees in the 
fence-corners beside a public road! How much 
more humanly natural and selfishly wise to have 
planted near the house, away from the road. But 
to grow cherries where the passing boy had only 
to mount the top rail to find his head amongst 
the fruit-laden boughs, marks a kindly soul akin 
to that infinite benignancy which plants the oasis 
in the midst of the burning Sahara. 

THE SHADOWS FALL. 

I am reluctant to dash with the clouds that 
came later the picture of the sunny old times on 
the Carnes farm. But my last meeting with the 
old story-teller show^ed that the volume had been 
closed. I was debarking from a steamboat at 
Marietta, Ohio, in the spring of 1863, ^^d came 
face to face on the dock with old Mr. Carnes and 
a son who had returned to the farm and been 
some years in charge of it. They were prison- 
ers in the hands of a guard of Union soldiers 
bound for Camp Chase. They professed not to 

75 



know why they had been arrested, but I learned 
afterwards that when the rebel raiders under 
Jones passed through their neighborhood a few 
days before, they had pointed out the farms of 
Union neighbors where the raiders might get 
horses without robbing their friends, and that 
their arrest was the result. Soon after their 
arrival at Camp Chase they took measles and 
both died and were buried there. 

Years after the war, visiting the old village 
for the last time, I passed the Carnes farm and 
saw the blackened ruins of the house where I 
had often been a welcome visitor. The build- 
ing had been accidentally burned, and I thought 
of all the little things connected with it which 
had undergone the final transformation. Over 
orchards and fields there was an air of neglect 
and decay. It was an illustration of the old truth 
put into words by Shakespeare, how ''one woe 
doth tread upon another's heel.'' The son's 
widow had remarried and given her boy a step- 
father. Old people, old times, old things had 
passed away, to visit, to revisit or be revisited, 
never again ! 



76 



A THEOLOGIC FAMILY-A PALE 
FACE IROQUOIS. 



A QUEER STREAK. 

There was one family at that time numerous 
in and around the village, who had been the 
pioneers and given their name to the place, char- 
acterized by some features deserving of mention. 
The group, as a whole, had received a theologic 
warp. Such things are not uncommon. Indeed 
the history of the race is a history of religious 
warp — of fads, dogmas, fanaticism — which have 
cost more suffering and bloodshed than even com- 
mercial selfishness and greed. Some good author- 
ity (I think it is Emerson) has said none of us is 
entirely sane. We all have our ''cricks and 
cranks." Many are daft on some one subject 
while quite level-headed on all others. This 
family seemed, in a degree, crazy about religion. 
It was a sort of monomania. Theology was their 
meat, drink and raiment; their daily task, and 

77 



likewise their recreation. One of the family had 
been a distinguished preacher and had helped 
found a denomination which today embraces a 
large membership throughout the United States. 
The later years of his life he was an inmate of a 
northern asylum for the insane. A brother of 
his was the head of the group in the village. The 
insane man had lucid intervals, in which he would 
write his brother long and interesting letters on 
religious topics. These the recipient would some- 
times bring over for the perusal of my father. 
This old brother sometimes preached in the vil- 
lage and neighboring churches, as the spirit 
moved him ; but whether his doctrine differed es- 
sentially from the beliefs of other protestant 
Christian denominations, I could not undertake 
to say. He called his the ''Christian" church ; so 
there was nothing novel at least in the name. Its 
membership was limited to. his own and a few 
allied families. He did not hold to the church 
founded by his brother. 

This old man was a sort of patriarch, not only 
for his own family group but for the village. He 

78 



married the young people and buried the 'old ; 
preached a little, cobbled a little to keep the wolf 
at bay ; and he had that kindliness of feeling and 
moral elevation which in a Catholic country 
would have made him an Abbe Constantin. 

THEOLOGY vs. BUSINESS. 

There were half a dozen sons of this old man, 
all rather intellectual men, each bred to some me- 
chanical trade — for in that day, unlike the pres- 
ent, boys were permitted to learn the useful trades 
— all sober and industrious men, yet none able to 
make more than a modest living, apparently be- 
cause their interest was so much absorbed by 
their theology that business was a secondary con- 
sideration. They did not seem to realize that ma- 
terial success was worth the effort, seeming to 
regard wealth of little value in comparison with 
the matter of being right about the eternal veri- 
ties, concerning which they gave themselves to 
endless speculation. They knew everything in 
the Bible, but little about the practical affairs of 
the mundane world. The Hebrew literature was 
their chief accomplishment, and quotations from 

79 



it were ever tripping from their tongues. They 
were well versed in all the ramifications of doc- 
trine that have branched from the Christian faith 
in the last nineteen hundred years and could 
quote every apt text in the Scriptures. Yet there 
was nothing gloomy or puritanic about their 
view of either religion or life; they were not 
cynical or discontented about one or the other. 

At times members of the family had coquetted 
with most of the isms that traveled around the 
country in their day, including Mormonism. The 
husband of one of the daughters went to Nauvoo 
when that city was headquarters for Jo. Smith 
and his followers ; but after some time spent there 
he returned home and thereafter let Mormonism 
carefully alone. He had gone there for honest 
investigation and been disappointed. It was to 
their credit that they were tolerant in matters of 
religious opinion — too tolerant, possibly, to ad- 
mit of their ever reaching solid ground ; for they 
were blown about by every "wind of doctrine" 
that came along and had their sails always set 
for a fresh breeze. 

80 



THEOLOGY VS. PROGRESS. 

The diagnosis of this group illustrates the dic- 
tum asserted by Dr. Draper in his ''Civil Policy," 
that devotion to theology is incompatible with 
scientific progress. He attributes the stagnation 
that has held Asia stationary through so many 
centuries to her devotion to theologic dogma 
rather than to science-. These good people of 
whom I write, while bright, good-tempered and 
in every way worthy, seem to have fallen into 
this theologic pool and to have found no means 
nor reason to extricate themselves. 

AN EXCEPTION. 

There was one old citizen of the name who 
concerned himself about anything else than the- 
ology. Not that he was not a man of moral 
principles, honorable and just in all his conduct. 
But he was a money-maker; had the genuine 
acquisitive instinct essential to business success. 
He inherited some land and acquired more. He 
devoted his energies to cattle grazing. As years 
went by he added farm to farm, and the cattle 

81 



on a good many hills were his. He died pos- 
sessed of the land on three sides of the village. 
On the fourth was a river to which nobody 
could give him title. 

A WII.D 0:^^SHOOT. 

This man had a brother as unlike him — and 
as unlike the rest of the name — as if he had been 
of a different race, who lived in a log house on 
the west bank of the river a few hundred yards 
below the village. He had around him a farm 
of perhaps a hundred acres, a large part of it 
river bottom; all highly productive. But his 
''gifts," as Deerslayer would express it, were 
not ''white gifts,'' and did not lie in the direction 
of farming. There appears to have been some 
miscarriage of nature's "first intention" regard- 
ing this man ; for he was an aborigine in a white 
skin. He was named for the Egyptian deliverer 
who led the Children of Israel through the wil- 
derness, and seems to have inherited a liking for 
the wilderness along with the name. "Mose" 
was a hunter and fisherman in all his instincts. 

82 



In person he was tall, erect, handsome. He 
would go about in summer with the minimum 
of clothing required by "a decent respect for the 
opinions of mankind" (as Mr. Jefferson has 
stated it), carrying sometimes a rifle, at others 
a great bow and arrows of his own make. The 
bow was six feet long, made of the best hickory, 
and, like the bow of Ulysses, took a strong arm 
to bend it. The arrows, tipped with iron socket- 
heads, made a deadly weapon for fish. ''Mose" 
had a canoe dug out of the trunk of a tulip poplar, 
nearly as buoyant as birch bark. This, when not 
in use, was moored under the river bank just 
fronting his house ; and there it lay in the sunny 
spring weather, a constant temptation to lure 
him away from his cornfield to the more agree- 
able pursuits of the river. When the water was 
clear he would run up the river in this canoe, 
which he drove with a paddle as expert as any 
other Indian, and then float down with the gentle 
current; and woe betide the fish that was un- 
lucky enough to cross his bow. No Chippewa 
in the Sault had a keener eye or a surer hand. 

83 



The iron-tipped arrow would reach the finny 
victim a yard below the surface. ''Mose'' was 
also a crack shot with the rifle, and the one he 
carried was as long as ''Killdeer." In the winter 
he put on his skates, for the river was his do- 
main summer or winter. He was as much at 
home on the ice as in the canoe ; and furs of mink 
and otter were no strangers in his domicile. 

WESTWARD, ho! 

"Mdse'' had an energetic wife and some pretty 
daughters growing up towards womanhood. At 
last the time ripened for a change; and under 
pressure from his growing family he sold out 
and went to the then distant West, partly from a 
feeling, I have no doubt, that Virginia was get- 
ting too civilized for his liking and a belief that 
better hunting and fishing awaited him in the 
new location selected by his wife. He settled on 
the bank of the Mississippi, where it is to be 
hoped he found, room for congenial pursuits be- 
fore his final departure for the ''happy hunting 
grounds" and fishing streams which must have 
filled his conception of the everlasting felicities. 

84 



"LAW DAYS"— THE LITTLE CON 
STABLE— FISTIC TOURNEYS 
THE RAIL-SPLITTERS. 



the: local judiciary. 

In early days this village was the center for a 
larger circle than later, after railroads had in- 
vaded adjacent territory and drawn people and 
business in other directions. People came long 
distances to trade, to attend church, and for the 
disposition of their legal affairs. The local law 
machinery consisted of two ''magistrates" and a 
constable. Two Saturdays in the month were 
set apart for the hearing of causes. These were 
known as ''law days." The constable was a little 
stub of man, a sort of "little giant" of the Stephen 
A. Douglas pattern physically, with a pug-dog 
type of physiognomy — the name of him Job She- 
han. He kept a small saddlery and harness shop 
just across the street from "Old W's" smithy. 

85 



But the shop was a sort of side issue. Job did 
not like his trade and did not prosper in it. His 
ambition was the law. He possessed a copy of 
the Virginia code and an old book of forms for 
justices and constables; he had hung around the 
county court as much as he could for a good 
many years, and had picked up fragments of the 
law (though- not many of the profits) and he felt 
that he was not wholly dissociated from the State 
judiciary. He at length compassed appointment 
as constable; but here the unfriendly fates inter- 
posed and barred further progress towards emi- 
nence in the profession. 

AN IMPRESSIVE TRIBUNAI.. 

When a law-day came around, the little con- 
stable was in high feather; and he bustled about 
with specs on nose and the ends of legal papers 
projecting from his breast-pockets. The sittings 
of the magistrates were for a time held in^ his 
shop — which was barely eight by ten. A great 
deal of formality and solemnity attended these 
sessions. In after years I sometimes saw the Su- 

86 



preme Court of the United States on the bench. 
It is one of the most dignified judicial bodies in 
the world. Yet for impressive solemnity — for 
making a youthful spectator feel the insignificance 
of an ordinary unofficial person before the ma- 
jesty of the law, — the justice court that used to 
be held in little Job Shehan's little shop impressed 
me far more profoundly than the national 
tribunal. 

SEEKING DIVERSION. 

These law-days served as dates for other kinds 
of engagements, as pegs on which could be hung 
other things than business. Existence dragged 
a little among these remote Virginia hills for a 
class of men who wanted some kind of titillation 
for the nerves. The chopping, the clearing, the 
plowing and hoeing, made tame work for a good 
many fellows of the rougher sort in this border 
land who were not especially attached to work 
but always hungry for conviviality and excite- 
ment. It thus happened that on law-days many 
came to town who had no law business — nor 
indeed any other kind of business, — but were in 

87 



search of diversion ; so that the Saturday crowds 
frequently filled the narrow streets and lined the 
garden fences with neighing horses. 

THE BORDER ANCESTRY. 

The historian Parkman, in recounting the In- 
dian forays resulting from the conspiracy of Pon- 
tiac about the middle of the Eighteenth century, 
by which the borders of Pennsylvania and Vir- 
ginia were devastated, devotes a page or so to the 
Virginia frontiersmen. He is describing a people 
who dwelt among these hills a hundred years be- 
fore the time of which I write ; yet so slow had 
been the progress and so slight the changes 
amongst these foot-hills of the Alleghenies that 
his description fits well the descendants of the 
men of whom he says : 

''The advancing frontiers of American civilization 
have always nurtured a class of men of striking and 
pecuHar character. The best examples of this class 
have, perhaps, been found among the settlers of western 
Virginia and the hardy progeny who have sprung from 
that generous stock. The well-beloved rifle was sel- 
dom out of his hand, and he never deigned to lay 
aside the fringed frock, moccasins and Indian leggins 

88 



which formed the proper costume of the forest ranger. 
Concerning the business, pleasures and refinements of 
cultivated life, he knew little and cared nothing; and 
his manners were usually rough and obtrusive to the 
last degree. Aloof from mankind, he lived in a world 
of his own, which in his view contained all that was 
deserving of admiration and praise. He looked upon 
himself and his compeers as models of prowess and 
manhood — nay, of all that is elegant and polite; and 
the forest gallant regarded with peculiar complacency 
his own half-savage dress, his swaggering gait and 
his backwoods jargon. He was wilful, headstrong 
and quarrelsome; frank, straightforward and generous; 
brave as the bravest, and utterly intolerant of arbitrary 
control. With all his ignorance, he had a mind by 
nature quick, vigorous and penetrating; and his mode 
of life, while it developed the daring energy of his 
character, wrought some of his faculties to a high de- 
gree of acuteness. Many of his traits have been re- 
produced in his -offspring." 



LIKE FATHER UKE SON. 

The traits thus graphically described by Park- 
man were characteristic fifty to sixty years ago 
of many backwoodsmen whom I well remember. 
Some never came into the village without the 
well-beloved rifle; others wore the "hunting- 
shirt," a sort of frock made of linsey, with fringe 

89 



around the edges of skirt and cape, belted in at 
the waist. Others wore a shorter frock, without 
the decoration of fringe, made of Hnsey or flan- 
nel (often red flannel). This was cut very loose 
and it was fastened around the waist, if at all, by 
.drawing forward the corners of the flowing 
skirts and tying them in front. This converted 
the frock into a sort of short jacket, thrust into 
the bosom and sides of which the wearer often 
found a convenient receptacle for carrying his 
packages. This garment was the 'Vamus'' (the 
root of the word no doubt being ''warm us"). 
It was not so much worn in the woods by the 
hunters as about the farms and clearings, being 
at once a warm and convenient garment, not in 
the way of work. Both hunting-shirt and wamus 
were usually pretty high-colored and made a pic- 
turesque figure of the wearer. The Saturday 
visitors always embraced a good many wearing 
the wamus and sometimes a few with the hunting- 
shirt. One of the latter was Chris. Conyngham, 
a typical 'Xeathdrstocking." He was tall and 
lank, carried a long rifle and was a dead-shot; 

90 



and when he came to the village always brought 
a string of small game, killed along the road, 
which he. bartered for powder and lead, after the 
manner of the true frontiersman. 

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE. 

Many of these Saturday roysterers came to 
town in the chronic condition known as ''spoiling 
for a fight/' This seemed to be the Outlet through 
which their overstocked energies sought relief. 
Under the stimulation of a few drinks, they be- 
came so obtrusive and pushed their pretensions 
with such offensiveness that they rarely failed to 
find what they were looking for. 

BACKWOODS RIVALRIES. 

Western Virginia has long shared with Ken- 
tucky an unenviable notoriety for feuds and ven- 
dettas ; but this attaches more to the southwest 
border than to the region of which this is writ- 
ten. In our vicinity, while there were rivalries — 
perhaps antipathies — there were no feuds that 

91 



rose to the dignity of the vendetta. The manners 
were rude and the truculent backwoods bulHes 
obtrusive and offensive beyond present beHef ; so 
that when they came in contact with others of 
their kind, fighting was as logical and inevitable 
as a result in chemistry. Each neighborhood had 
its fighting champion. The rivalry between them 
and between the neighborhoods that championed 
them was intense, but as a matter of pride, not 
hatred. There were reputations to be maintained ; 
also reputations to be achieved; for as the old 
cocks crowed tJie young ones learned. When 
these rival ''best men" came together, by chance 
or by arrangement, there was bound to be a trial 
of strength and skill. The ''modern degeneracy" 
of ring, seconds and sponges — of preliminary 
trainings, gate-money and betting — had not yet 
touched the honorable simplicity of those times. 
Men fought for distinction, not money. They 
came off their farms or out of the woods ready at 
a moment's notice to take off their wamuses and 
justify their claim to be the "best man" on the 
ground. 

02 



GRIST F^OR HIS MII.I.. 

The law-day, in bringing this kind of material 
into the village and into inevitable contact, be- 
came self-propagating ; for as the fighters had to 
be arrested by the little constable — who judi- 
ciously waited till the melee had been well started 
and then rushed in with "I command the peace !'' 
—it resulted that one law-day provided grist for 
the next, and so on ad infinitum. Rarely would a 
law-day pass without at least one fight. 
On one occasion — a field day — there were seven. 
That was a red letter day in the calendar of the 
little constable. On one occasion a spectator who 
thought the officious constable was spoiling the 
entertainment dealt him a quiet knock-down so 
that the fight then in progress should not be in- 
terrupted just at the interesting point. The of- 
ficer was carried to the rear, and for the rest of 
the day the sport went forward without any 
annoying interference. 

The crowds were usually gathered about the 
whiskey-shops ; but when two champions chanced 
to meet, wherever it might be, that point was 

93 



liable to become the storm-center. These fights 
were not often vicious. Men did not take foul 
advantages. I do not remember any knifing. The 
participants had a hazy idea, I fancy, that they 
were following (far behind, of course), in the 
footsteps of the old cavaliers, from whom remote- 
ly they might claim lineage, who were supposed 
to have broken lances in knightly tournaments in 
the mother country. But it must be admitted 
the old-time courtesy of the English knight had 
lost something by transplantation in the wilder- 
ness of Virginia. 

DAMON AND PYTHIAS. 

In this connection- there comes to me recol- 
lection of a pair of wood-choppers who for a long 
time were regular Saturday visitors. They did 
not restrict themselves to the fortnightly law- 
days but came every Saturday, rain or shine. 
They were not fighters. The only encounter 
they ever had was with John Barleycorn, by 
whom they were always worsted. One was a 
man well along in years ; the other a comparative 

94 



3'OUth. But the youthful appetite for Hquor was 
quite as robust as that of the veteran. Both were 
noted axemen and rail-spHtters. Perhaps Abe 
Lincoln in his best days could not have converted 
more trees into rails in a week than the elder of 
this pair. They worked in the woods all week 
and came to town Saturday afternoon for their 
compensation, which took the form of a beastly 
drunk. They were inofifensive in their cups ; and 
when they had got their load, supplemented by a 
jug- full to sober up on, they would take the road 
for home but would bring up in a friendly fence- 
corner, where they would spend a quiet night — 
and the next day, if the jug held out. Monday 
morning would find them back in the woods, to 
repeat this program week after week and year 
after year. I have the impression of having heard 
in recent years that the elder of this pair froze 
to death one winter night while taking his com- 
pensation in his accustomed way. 

the: be^setting vice. 

The reader will perceive there was a good deal 
of drunkenness in the times and life I am trying 
to portray. It was the one overpowering vice of 

95 



^ 



these isolated communities lacking other and less 
harmful means of diversion. With the rougher 
characters, it was the only means they knew of 
procuring that exaltation of the nerves which the 
human animal always craves and which the more 
refined communities find so many other ways of 
producing. They resorted to liquor without con- 
trol or care for consequences, as the Indians did 
after their introduction to the ''fire-water.'' 

Whiskey was the only form of intoxicating drink 
attainable in that region at that day. Lack of 
transport excluded malt liquors, while wines for 
the common people were out of the question. 
Whiskey could be produced right in the woods 
and was within reach of all ; and perhaps nothing 
milder would have been acceptable, anyhow, to 
the rank appetite for intoxicants that grew up 
in the rude life of forest and field among the hills. 



96 



riH 



A VIRGINIA PATRIARCH AND HIS 

HOME. 



.MANUMITS HIS SIvAVES. 

Three miles from the village an uncle of 
my father lived on his three or four hundred 
acre farm whose home was to me and to numer- 
ous grandchildren a sort of Mecca, to which 
we made pilgrimages more frequent, if less de- 
vout, than the faithful to the Moslem shrine. 
Uncle Brodie was a good type of the old Vir- 
ginia planter. He was of generous proportions 
in person, and the outward man not unfitly ex- 
pressed the inner. Of more than average intelli- 
gence for that time and region, a moderate reader 
of books and such newspapers as the times af- 
forded, he was a high-minded and just man in 
all his relations with his fellow-men. He had 
been the owner by inheritance of a number of 
slaves ; but his intelligence and conscience warned 

97 



him that slavery was wrong and dangerous, and 
he had manumitted these before my time, with 
the exception of one boy who was to be free at 
twenty-eight. These freed people continued to 
live in the vicinity, not more than half glad to be 
free, so kindly was their feeling towards their 
old master. One of the freedmen went to Penn- 
sylvania after some yea^s and remained there a 
long time. In his old age, his heart ''turned back 
to Dixie'' and he went back, long after Uncle 
Brodie was in his grave; and, by permission of 
a son then in possession of the farm, built a cabin 
in the woods on its border and there spent his 
last lonely days. 

Uncle Brodie was a good deal at our house 
and always talked with my father about the ques- 
tion of slavery. It was not a matter of much 
interest to me at that time ; but I used to be 
amused at the odd pronunciation with which he 
spoke of the ''slavery quextion." He was always 
glad that he had washed his hands of the institu- 
tion, and expressed frequent forebodings that ulti- 
mately it would make a national trouble. 

98 



- 1 



THE OLD MAN IN HIS CHAIR. 

It his later years he became very stout. In 
summer he spent most of the day in a great arm- 
chair on the porch, looking up the valley to the 
wooded hills, ruminating on the life that was 
past rather than on the things of the present. 
He had -a kind word for all who approached him, 
and w^e children were not afraid of him. 
He was a patriarchal figure as he sat there, with 
his clothes of queer old-fashioned cut, his hat 
tall of crown and generous of brim, of antiquated 
but not ''grandfather" type, holding in his hand 
the big knotted cane which had become his in- 
separable companion ; his hair snow-white and 
worn long; the face fair, placid and benignant, 
full and inclined to be florid, with a fringe of 
white beard below the shaven cheeks. Many a 
summer day I saw him thus; but at last one 
summer came and found the big chair on the old 
porch empty, and there was a fresh grave in the 
family acre on the little knoll a hundred yards 
or so from the house. 

I. OF a 99 



AN OLD-TIME HOUSEKEEPER. 

My great-aunt was a handsome dark-eyed old 
lady who in her youth must have possessed great 
beauty. She was accustomed even in her last 
years to look after the household and help with 
her own hands about the cooking, which went 
on in a big kitchen with great open log fireplace, 
Dutch ovens, cranes and hangers. Her cookery 
was renowned in the large circle that was privi- 
leged to enjoy the hospitality of the house. Such 
''pumpkin-custards/' with such golden crust, 
were not to be foujid on any other table. When 
a large irruption of grandchildren and grand- 
nephews invaded the hospitable board, it took a 
good many of these pumpkin-custards to go 
around. But abundance and welcome were the 
characteristics of the household and of the large- 
hearted hosts. 

PEACHES WITH A TANG. 

The farm was generously fruited. There were 
apples in plenty, pears, berries, peaches ; and there 

100 



was a maple sugar grove in a cove of the hill on 
the north side of the valley, where in the early 
spring, sometimes before the snow was gone, 
there would be sap-boilings and ''stirring-ofif'' ; 
of which some of the privileged youngsters would 
be apprised in time to take a hand. At the west 
end, on what had once been a separate farm 
called ''old Santy'' was a peach orchard to which 
the colored boy used to take me. On one of these 
visits he gave me some lines of an Old Virginia 
negro ditty two of which have stuck like Page's 
glue. I have never been able to forget them : 

''Away down yander in Pee-Yankee Tankee, 
The blue wind blows and the turkeys chaw ter- 
backer." 

DOCTOR JOHN. 

One of Uncle Brodie's sons at home was Dr. 
John, who had attended a medical college at Cin- 
cinnati and was leisurely looking over the field a 
little to see where he should plant his feet. He 
was a man of large intelligence and kindly tem- 
per, not above taking a human interest in a boy, 

101 



who in this instance repaid it with sincere admira- 
tion and affection. I used to follow him around 
a good deal when he happened to be at home. 
He did not assume any of the farm-work, but 
one day he went out to lay up a few panels of 
rail fence around a young peach orchard. • As I 
stood by and watched him construct the fence, he 
called my attention to a rail as he placed it on 
the top. ''Now,'' he remarked, ''there is a rail 
made from the heart of a white-oak that will last 
as long as you will. Before that rail rots, you 
will be an old gray-headed man.'' How wild and 
remote seemed the thought! It was too far 
away to be worth a moment's anxiety. Every- 
thing would come to pass before that. And yet, 
after all, how little it is that has come to pass ! 
The fifty odd years have gone like a dream, and 
looked back to now seem almost as brief — and 
as absurd. What a wonderful thing is the stand- 
point when we come to take a look at life ! Doc- 
tor John long ago passed over to the silent ma- 
jority. I can hardly suppose his heart-rail sur- 
vived him. 

102 



Sometimes the Doctor would take down the 
family rifle and we would go into the woodland 
that comprised a part of the farm and bring 
home some squirrels. We rarely failed to find 
plenty of this small game; and my share of the 
sport was to scare the little fellows around on 
the Doctor's side of the tree and retrieve them 
when they tumbled down under his sure aim. 

HORNETS AND ETHICS. 

Passing around the farm one day, w^e discov- 
ered a big hornets' nest on the fence hear a gate. 
''Never mind," quoth the Doctor, ''we'll come 
around to-night and fix those fellows." He pro- 
cured a long pole, tied a bunch of straw on the 
end; and after nightfall, with this incendiary 
weapon and equally incendiary purpose, we went 
to the place and the Doctor applied the torch. 
He put the blazing straw directly under the exit 
so that when the poor wretches tried to escape 
from their burning dwelling they flew right into 
the flames. After the deed was done, I could not 

103 



help feeling some remorse for my part in it as 
an accessory. I put it to the Doctor, how would 
he like for some great giant to come like this in 
the night and burn our house, blocking the door 
with fire so we could not even get out? The 
Doctor admitted the cruelty in the abstract, but 
justified the deed in the concrete on the score of 
necessity. The nest was close beside a road; a 
farm team might be stung and cause serious 
disaster ; and we had a right to protect ourselves 
from such danger even by the destruction of the 
hornets, cruel as it seemed. 

I smile now in recalling the argument^ as the 
Doctor did then at my protest; and cannot but 
reflect that his plea is the one that is filed in all 
controveries, great or small, between men and 
between nations when the stronger seeks to just- 
ify its rapacity or cruelty towards the weaker. 
Power knows no law but its own interest; and 
whether driven by this to burn a hornets' nest or 
seize the territory of some weaker nation, the 
argument is equally sound, and at the same time 

104 



equally fallacious. The dictum of Emerson is that 
''Nature arms and equips. an animal to find its 
place and living in the earth, and, at the same 

time, she arms and equips another animal to de- 
stroy it." If we accept this, superior might in 
the animal kingdom gives right. If man is only 
an animal, and nations only aggregations of ani- 
mals, and amenable only to the law of the animal 
kingdom, then they, too, must abide this imperial 
right of the strongest. But if man is subject to 
a moral law, so nations are; and under that re- 
sponsibility, the question takes a different hue. 



105 



THE OLD MERCHANT AND HIS 
PARTNER. 



THE TREND UP STREAM. 

It is a curious thing connected with this old 
village — a fact that has, I suppose, a philosophic 
base — that nine-tenths of what little immigration 
to it there was^ came from down the river; and 
that those who left the place went on up stream. 
The migratory impulse was up stream, as it is 
with the fish in the spring-time. 

One who came in about 1845 was an old mer- 
chant, from a county town fifteen miles down 
the river. He was well advanced in years. He 
located in an old store building near the river, 
where a firm of merchants had done business till 
forced by the calamities following the panic of 
1837 to give up the fight. Like his predecessors 
in that building, he had met with reverses and 

106 



was about to begin, in his advanced years, to try 
to retrieve his fortunes. 

A COMMI^RCIAL DISASTER. 

An incident I recall in connection with the in- 
auguration of the enterprise is that one day, go- 
ing home to dinner as he supposed, the old gen- 
tleman lost a five dollar bill. This is not a great 
deal of money as reckoned in these days, yet the 
impression made on me at the time was that it 
was a very serious disaster. The merchant him- 
self seemed so to regard it; for the search for 
the lost note was kept up for a week, every foot 
of the ground between the store and the house 
being scanned as keenly as ever was an elusive 
trail by a pursuing Mohican. In vain, and time 
at last healed the wound. 

THE OIvD MERCHANT. 

Despite this heavy loss, the store prospered and 
w^as moved up town into more central and .com- 
modious quarters. Roger McKee for the fifteen 
succeeding years that he lived was a familiar fig- 

107 



ure on the street as he passed between his store 
and his home. But rarely was he seen elsewhere 
except at his place of business and sometimes at 
church. He was a man who had felt the heavy- 
hand of misfortune and showed the scars ; and 
while courteous to all, and especially engaging 
to customers in his store, he was inclined to with- 
draw socially within his own home. Between 
fifty and sixty, spare, somewhat bowed and lame, 
gray of head, a keen colorless face and sharp 
black eye, shrewd, persuasive, polished, he was 
devoted to the one purpose, of making his busi- 
ness successful. 



A 'Svicke:d partner. 



His partner and financial backer was a middle- 
aged bachelor who came from the same town. 
John Chiswell was something of a valetudinarian, 
inclined to be irascible, but, like McKee, a man 
of more education and polish than the average 
in that community. He boarded at the village 
tavern. He spent a good deal of time at the 
store, though not assuming any duties in con- 

108 



nection with it; but at times he found the days 
too long. He bought a fine horse and rode about 
the country for health and recreation. One 
spring he thought he would try fishing as a means 
of passing the time ; so he procured a handsome 
tackle from the east, and one bright morning set 
out with a bucket of live minnows, caught for 
him by a boy who was glad to earn a silver dime, 
for a pool half a mile or so below the village 
where the water was very deep and the biggest 
fish were supposed to be in hiding. 

A TIRED YOUNG WALTON. 

On the hill across the river lived an old couple 
who had been for years charges on the pubHc 
charity. They had a son who was a strapping 
fellow as to physical proportions but of very fee- 
ble resolution in the matter of work. It was said 
that instead of helping his aged parents, he had 
to some extent lived off the supplies furnished 
them by the county. He had thoroughly con- 
vinced them that he was not able to work, and 
they felt sorry for him. ''If I only had the 

109 



money/' said the vacant-minded old man one day 
to a visitor, ''I would buy me a farm in the 
spring ; and then there would be some encourage- 
ment for William to do something for us." This 
weary youth had married early and had a brood 
that was rapidly outgrowing his slender pros- 
pects of feeding them. For work did not agree 
with him. Fishing was more to his taste. In- 
deed, what Washington Irving says about Rip 
Van Winkle seems to fit the case exactly. Like 
Rip, ''he had an insuperable aversion to alLkinds 
of profitable labor. It could not be for want of 
assiduity or perseverance, for he would sit on a 
wet rock with a rod as long and heavy as a Tar- 
tar's lance and fish all day without a murmur, 
even though not encouraged by a single nibble." 

PRE-EMPTION. 

It chanced, perhaps through some law of co- 
incidence not yet understood whereby persons 
totally foreign to each other are moved to do the 
same thing at the same time, that sweet William 
had made his arrangements to go fishing the 

110 



same morning as Mr. Chiswell, and had selected 
the same place for his first cast; had started a 
little earlier than the elder; and that when the 
latter arrived at Brown's Hole, behold, on the 
identical rock*which he had marked one day when 
riding past as best fitted for the purpose, sat the 
stalwart but tired young man, who like the elder 
found the tedium vitae rather trying this warm 
May morning, seeking to adjust himself to some 
spot on the surface of the rock that would most 
comfortably fit his shapely anatomy. 

When this picture confronted the vision of 
John Chiswell, unspeakable rage and disgust took 
possession of him, from his gnarly teeth to the 
tip of his polished boot. He tossed his tackle 
and minnows into the river and went home. He 
never went fishing again and took a savage pleas- 
ure in relating this incident as the reason. 



Ill 



A SUCKER-CATCHING OLD 
COBBLER. 



HIS PERSON AUTY. 

On a slope between two hills which opened to 
let a brook come down to the river, some half a 
mile below the village on the farther side, in a 
modest cottage embowered by trees and vines, 
surrounded by a few acres embracing garden, 
fruit and pasturage, lived in these days James 
Maston. Through some mysterious dispensation, 
he had when a young man wandered away from 
Philadelphia into this obscurity. He had mar- 
ried an unsophisticated girl, sister of two neigh- 
boring farmers who had dowered her with this 
modest home that had now for many years shel- 
tered them and two blooming daughters. The 
old fellow was of so retiring a disposition as to 
be almost a recluse. He cobbled a little, and 
drank a little at times to relieve the weariness 

112 



of existence, but in a private, inoffensive way; 
and in this part of his relaxation it was said some- 
times received material aid from Aunt Lizzie, his 
good wife. ''Uncle Jimmie" was one of those un- 
obtrusive persons whom you might live within a 
mile of for a generation and never know it if 
you did not stumble on him by accident. 

HIS RKI^XATION. 

Yet in common with more aggressive humanity, 
he at times needed a little unstringing of the 
bow; and it happened to suit his inclination and 
circumstances, business then being slack, to take 
this in the spring, when the dog-woods were in 
blossom and the white suckers feeding in the 
river. On a fair morning, then, he would slip 
down to the river with a tin of earth-worms, a 
wax-end line and a home-grown rod, and fish for 
suckers — never for anything else. Why this ex- 
clusive attention to the suckers? Perhaps there 
was too much excitement about catching pike or 
bass; or it may have been too much trouble to 
procure live bait. Perhaps, on the other hand, 

113 



the sucker was more to his taste; he may have 
been moved by some unconscious sense of affinity. 
The white sucker, by the way, is the tail-end 
of all its tribe. The meat is sweet, and that is 
the exasperating thing about it; for it is so 
stuffed with little fagots of bones sharp as nee- 
dles that it is perilous to eat one. In the economy 
of nature, each member of the animal kingdom 
is provided with some means of defense. The 
porcupine has its barbs, the hare and deer their 
speed, the froumart its scent-bag, and so on 
through the list. Maybe these fagots were given 
the white sucker in pursuance of this general 
scheme. But the provisions of nature, wise as 
they are, are not- always equal to the art of man. 
Uncle Jimmie was not to be defeated by any little 
scheme of natural design like this. 

HIS METHOD. 

In certain conditions of the river, these fish 
would lie along the shore and root in the bottoni 
for their meals. By some sort of hokus-pokus 
Uncle Jimmie knew when they were engaged in 

114 



these researches. He would then sit down in the 
sand, throw in his worm-baited hook and wait, 
while he patiently chewed his tobacco and the cud 
of reflection. This quiet kind of fishing was con- 
ducive to meditation. He had the river, the blue 
sky, the green earth for silent but sympathetic 
company. All nature was serene, and why should 
not man be in harmony with such surroundings? 

INTROSPECTION. 

Who could guess how many of life's problems 
were revolved by the old cobbler in these silent 
hours by the river? For the problems of exist- 
ence come to us all alike, and are likeliest to 
knock at the door when we are least engaged 
with worldly thoughts. Each soul, whether 
housed in the palace of the millionaire or in the 
hut, or whether it be under the open sky, is a part 
of the same Infinity and has the same ultimate 
and imperious questions to meet— Whence, what, 
whither ? Outside of our own experiences, broad 
or narrow, we take up these questions and wres- 
tle with them in the silence and loneliness that 

115 



come at times to all. A Vanderbilt having his 
millions to think of must yet give some time and 
thought to these deep personal problems, which 
will remain with him when his millions may 
have fled, or he have fled from them. The old 
man spending the day beside the river, under be- 
nignant skies of June, gives these peaceful hours 
first to a review of his life — useful or useless, well 
or ill spent ; he laments its mistakes and failures ; 
and then, when he has gone over and over it all 
and buried his regrets, and dug them up and 
buried them ^gain, his thoughts go on to the 
beyond, the infinite, the eternal, and his possible 
part in it. Vainly he sends his query into the 
mysterious abyss; there comes back neither an- 
swer nor echo. He questions the sphinx, but 
there is no reply to his least interrogation ; and 
wearied at last with these vain importunities, 
he is glad to be brought back to reality by finding 
that a fish has taken his hook and needs attention. 
He has taken care to come to the river with a 
bit of bait for himself, so he may enter on the day 
with serenity and confidence. He would just as 

116 



lief the suckers would let his hook alone and leave 
him to his dolce far niente. Nevertheless, every 
few minutes he finds a fish fooling with his hook 
and has to pull it out to be rid of the annoyance. 
Thus he sits there and hauls out suckers all day 
long while nobody else thinks it worth while to 
try. 

ANIMUS. 

The foregoing is my best opinion of Uncle 
Jimmie's idiosyncrasy in the matter of white 
suckers ; but some others held to a different the- 
ory. This was that while he himself did not eat 
fish, Aunt Lizzie was fond of them, and urged 
him often, like the Lady Jane of Ingoldsby, to 
''go catch some more." He enjoyed the recrea- 
tion, and to get even with his wife on general 
principles he evolved the scheme of never taking 
home any kind of fish except these faggot suck- 
ers ; and the secret enjoyment he had in seeing 
her struggle with the bones compensated him for 
many things that his poverty-ridden and hen- 
pecked life with her had deprived him of. 

117 



This chronicle would not be complete without 
recording that some years later, after Uncle Jim- 
mie had left off catching white suckers — and all 
else earthly — the bereaved widow, needing some 
one else for this service, comforted herself by 
marrying one William May. He was locally and 
colloquially known as "Baboon Bill'' May, owing 
to a strong resemblance to that ancestral type of 
the race, and he did not resent the soubriquet. 
Aunt Lizzie lisped in her speech ; and when some 
of her friends expressed a little surprise at her 
choice, she observed in her placid way that ''Mith- 
ter May'' was ''not pretty" but he had ''pretty 
wayth." 



118 



A MAN WHO HAD THE GIFT OF 
CONTINUANCE. 



A WOMAN WITH SAVING GRACE. 

Jonathan Fontenay, as I first recall him, was a 
man in middle life, with some boys about my own 
age. Their mother, a clever woman, whose broth- 
ers were lawyers, — one located in Quincy, Illinois, 
and for a time mayor of that city, — took no com- 
fort in life for worry. Like Madam Gilpin, she 
''had a frugal mind," and spent her life fighting 
the demon of waste. It was said of her that 
when there had been sickness in the family and 
medicine was left over, she would gather it up 
and take it herself, that it might not be lost. 
"But that is a fable" — (as Othello remarked when 
he looked down at the feet of lago to see if they 
were cleft). Fable or not, she was a most worthy, 
hafd-working woman, whose reward, if the ac- 
counts are properly balanced, will come to her 
in another world.' 

119 



Fontenay was a carpenter and millwright — a 
man of mechanical genius equal to almost any 
kind of work that required a skilful hand, while 
he had a patience no discouragement could wear 
out. 

THE OI.D SAW-MII^U 

On the western outskirts of the village, She- 
han's Run had been dammed and the water-power 
utilized by a saw-mill of the pattern common to 
primitive regions. It was the property of the 
citizen who owned the land around the village. 
It was such a mill as that on the Genessee river- 
which the bear took charge of while the miller 
went on a brief vacation. (See McGuffey's school 
reader for particulars.) The bear sat down on 
the moving log to eat the miller's dinner and be- 
came so engrossed that before he was aware what 
had happened he had been converted into two 
slabs of bear meat. This story, which we boys 
were all familiar with, lent interest to the opera- 
tion of this mill. In Mr. Fontenay's day it took a 
good deal of mending to make the dam and ''fore- 
bay'' hold water ; much tinkering to persuade the 
wheel to do its share of the work and to keep 

120 



the crank and connections with the saw in order. 
The saw itself was the one upright, rehable mem- 
ber of the estabHshment that could always be de- 
pended on. It got a little dull at times, as who 
would not fed on nothing but wood ; and when it 
had to be filed it raised ''goose-flesh" on half the 
people in the town. With all its faults, this old 
mill, as a mechanical triumph, ranked above Mr. 
Starke's lathe ; for one reason, that it made a 
great deal more noise. 

A HUMAN SAW-MILL. 

By and by the owner concluded to build a flour- 
ing mill, and Fontenay was put to work on this.' 
After a long time, he doing everything himself 
except to raise the frame and make the ''burrs," 
the mill was completed, the same water-power ap- 
plied to a great undershot wheel, and all put in 
his charge. It was a large mill, from the local 
point of view, and the proprietor thought he 
would try shipping flour down the river. So 
Fontenay was set to work to build a flat-boat to 
carry the flour, to be launched at the old boat- 

121 



yard at the mouth of the Run. Stringers were 
wanted for the boat some sixty to seventy feet 
long. The saw-mill would not take in timbers so 
long; so Mr. Fontenay, with a pluck no under- 
taking could dash, rigged up the long hewed tree 
on trestles and, standing under it with a whip- 
saw cut out the stringers required for the bottom 
of the boat. It took time — and something more. 
The boat was built, launched, loaded and de- 
spatched with its cargo. The venture was prob- 
ably not a prosperous one, for it was not re- 
peated. 

Coincident w4th these labors, Mr. Fontenay, 
who lived in a srhall one-story frame on the rear 
of his lot, built a new and much larger house, 
doing all the work himself. How he found the 
time to do it, seeing there are but twenty-four 
hours in a day, I do not know. It is the magic 
of industry and patience backed by an inflexible 
will. Those who want to succeed must get to- 
gether these elements. 

Mr. Fontenay was lank of figure and solemn of 
visage ; a man of few words but not sour ; a 

122 



churchman who faithfully attended service and 
Sunday-school and gave every hour of his week- 
day life to the betterment of his fortunes. He 
was appointed justice of the peace and presided 
over many an impressive convocation, first in Job 
Shehan's little harness shop and later in the mill 
office, where he was a sort of Sir Matthew Hale 
in his miller's suit. In time he was able to buy a 
little farm up the valley; and here with the help 
of his boys he raised corn, potatoes and sorghum 
and pastured his cows and horses. 

GOi:S I^OR A SOLDIER. 

A few years after he had attained this position 
of independence (considering the simplicity of the 
life around him), and might have taken a well- 
earned rest, the war of the Rebellion began, and 
he was one of the first to offer himself — at the 
age of fifty-two — for enlistment in a Union com- 
pany raised in the village and neighborhood. He 
w^as so persistent that he was accepted and served 
till discharged two years later, on account of fail- 
ing health. 

123 



A year before the opening of the war one of his 
sons struck out for himself; went to Independ- 
ence, Missouri, joined a train and crossed the 
plains into California. Thence he passed into 
Oregon, where he enlisted in a company of U. S. 
mounted troops doing Indian service ; was with 
the party that first discovered the great falls of 
the Shoshone, of which he wrote me a full ac- 
count at the time ; after three years' service, went 
into the gold mines in Montana ; came home with 
a belt full of gold in 1866; and returning to the 
mines was killed by a falling bucket of ore while 
standing at the foot of a shaft. 

Before this fatality, the Fontenay's sold out, 
root and branch, and went to eastern Kansas; 
where, as I have never heard of his death, I cher- 
ish the hope this tireless old man is still living 
and still contributing to the world's welfare. For 
I think nature intended him for a very long stay, 
and see not how, with his persistence, he could 
ever let go earthly tasks or find time to take his 
promotion. 



124 



A VARIEGATED GROUP. 



A MAN WITH A VOICK. 

Samuel Southwood — ''Uncle Sammy" or ''Old 
Sammy/^ as the custom permitted him to be called 
— had a nursery a few miles away from which a 
large section of country was supplied with choice 
young fruit trees. He was thoroughly master of 
his business, and something more. Not only had 
he the best varieties, but he knew all about them 
and could tell everything he knew with enviable 
fluency. On law-days, election-days, at muster, 
or when there was a show in' town, Uncle Sammy 
would drive in with a wagon-load from his nur- 
sery and orchard. In the spring he would have 
young trees, and whether spring or fall he would 
have bags of choice apples — fresh picked in the 
fall, kept over in the spring. With his readiness 
and unfailing bonhommie, he always got rid of 

125 



his load and took nothing back home but the 
empty wagon and a full pocket-book. 

One of Uncle Sammy's gifts was a ''long-dis- 
tance" voice. He could carry on a conversation 
with a man in the next square with the utmost 
ease. Ordinarily when he started home, he would 
continue to converse with the people left behind 
as long as they could hear him; but as the road 
crossed the hill about a quarter of a mile out, the 
monologue was cut short at the turn. 

About 1850 a menagerie pa'ssed through the 
country but did not bill our village. The nearest 
point it touched was a small town seven miles to 
the eastward. A party of such boys as were able 
to finance the enterprise walked to this place to 
see the show. The crush was, great, and when 
the ticket-wagon was opened it was surrounded 
by a wild mob of several hundred clamoring for 
tickets, each apparently fearing there would be 
nothing left for him to see if he did not gain in- 
stant admission. In a few moments, above all the 
uproar, rang out the clear bell-like voice of Uncle 
Sammy Southwood: ''Give me four tickets!" and 

126 



looking around we beheld our old friend about 
fifty feet away from the wagon, mounted on top 
of a fence, gesticulating with all his might, hold- 
ing up two silver dollars and shaking them at the 
ticket-seller in the wagon. Uncle Sammy had 
been taken by surprise. He had been working 
his way in towards the wagon, and if he had not 
made too long a calculation would have arrived 
in season. But the crowd rushed in and cut him 
off from the goal of his wild desires, and all he 
could do was to send up his appeal from the out- 
skirts. ''Give me four tickets V he yelled with 
increasing vehemence, as he saw the stream of 
tickets flowing into the hands of the more for- 
tunate, who immediately rushed for the entrance. 
The busy ticket-seller caught Uncle Sammy's ap- 
peal, and I saw him smile as much as to say : 
"Only wait a little; you shall have a chance to 
contribute.'' Everything comes to him who waits. 
With surprising celerity the crowd was served 
and melted away; and soon our friend had ex- 
changed his two Mexican dollars for four bits of 
pasteboard which opened to him and to his three 

127 



youngest boys all the glories and surprises con- 
cealed within the monster canvas. 

A MAN WITH A STOMACH. 

''Big Ike" Marvin was a frequent visitor to the 
tavern for several years. He was one of three 
brothers who lived a few miles to the south. The 
other two had grazing farms and were well to 
do. 'Tke'' was the black sheep of the family. He 
was a great big, portly, rollicking ''Hurry Harry'' 
sort of man, in his early prime ; handsome in per- 
son and feature, dark of eye, with black close- 
curling hair, fine teeth, which he was ever show- 
ing, for when in company he was always in a 
laughing mood ; fond of hard riding, whiskey and 
all forms of gambling ; with a gustatory capacity 
about which there were wild legends. It was said 
that once on a wager, he ate at one sitting the 
whole of a large turkey with dressing, a peck of 
sweet potatoes, trimmings and side dishes, with a 
generous quantity of drink ; and then got up and 
declared he was still hungry. It used to be re- 
lated of a venerable Methodist preacher at Wheel- 

128 



ing of noted trencher capacity that he was accus- 
tomed to say a turkey was ''a very inconvenient 
bird — a Httle too large for one and not large 
enough for two/' Marvin did not find it so. In 
the slang* of the present day, a turkey was ''just 
his size/' — if it was a large one. 

Big Ike never came to town that he did not 
hunt up an old crony, with whom he would "pitch 
dollars" by the hour, followed (I now presume 
without knowing it then) by gambling with 
cards; for this friend was a professional, and 
was as glad to see Marvin as Ike was to see him. 
Marvin never got drunk, for he had a head no 
amount of liquor could upset. Nevertheless, I 
judge the silver dollars remained with his friend 
when Ike set out for home. 

AN OI.D RED SANDSTONE. 

In a cove off a high ridge on the road to my 
grandfather's lived a queer old fellow, Henry 
Gumphrey, who was several removes nearer to the 
old red sandstone age than any geological speci- 
men it was ever my fortune to know. He was 

129 



boorish and eccentric beyond parallel. Somehow 
the process of developing and polishing the race 
had gone over his head. He had a small farm, 
from which by rude culture he managed to ex- 
tract the necessities of an animal existence ; and 
this sufficed, for he did not feel the need of pro- 
viding for any of the higher attributes of his 
kind. He had a wife — a fact which illustrates 
the powerful and persistent purpose of nature to 
perpetuate the species. They had two or three 
daughters, who, despite the barrenness of their 
home, bloomed out as flowers will sometimes in 
the scantiest soil. One of them blossomed into a 
''poetess" who could make fooHsh rhymes with- 
out reason and was thought by the familv to be a 
genius. 

Mr. Gumphrey was a quaint figure as he used 
to pass through the village on his way to the mill. 
He had an old horse that had groy^m into some 
sort of resemblance to its master. It wore no 
shoes, nor in summer did he. He was accus- 
tomed to wear his shirt-sleeves rolled up above his 
elbows, exposing his brown, muscular and hairy 

130 



arms. He never rode the horse but led it with 
a strap a couple of yards long. The animal was 
equipped with a packsaddle across which would 
be slung a bag or two of grain. 

When Gumphrey was young, he devoted him- 
self to music. The jews'-harp was his favorite in- 
strument; and he once confided to a friend that 
nothing in the world gave him so much pleasure. 

Regarding his relations to the rest of creation, 
Gumphrey had some very original ideas, and he 
sometimes expressed unique opinions. On one 
occasion a summer storm blew down a great tree 
at the upper edge of his corn-field. As ill-for- 
tune would have it, the tree fell across the field 
which lay on a steep slope; and it rolled down 
the hill, over and over agam, clear jto the bot- 
tom, crushing the corn as it went. When Gum- 
phrey came to view the destruction wrought, he 
was wild with rage. He finally got down on all 
fours and beat the ground with his fist, and de- 
clared that, ''in the long run, God Almighty does 
more harm than good!" 

131 



A CHIP 01^ OU) AI.BION. 

From a very early day there lived a half-mile 
out of the village an elderly shoemaker, ''Jim- 
mie" Hartwell, who in later times was called "Ju- 
das'' — not because he had ever betrayed his Sav- 
ior, but from a fashion he had of swearing by the 
historic traitor. This vice of swearing is a 
, curious thing. Some men swear because an ex- 
pletive of some kind seems to be necessary to their 
dignity; others swear under excitemtot, to give 
relief to their feelings ; some from force of habit, 
.without thinking about it. Perhaps nobody means 
to do it out of mere depravity. Some decorous 
gentlemen who would not employ raw profanit}^ 
but feel something necessary to support the mas- 
terful air which a round oath is supposed to con- 
fer, resort to some kind of euphemism which shall 
serve their purpose without offending good mor- 
als or manners. One old gentleman I used to 
know, a good churchman, finding ordinary lan- 
guage inadequate in moments of stress, resorted 
to a synonym of two syllables ; and his ''Condemn 
it!'' with a strong accent on the ''demn," enabled 

132 



him to express his sentiments and still keep 
within the boundaries of good form. 

Uncle Judas was mild, inoffensive, dignified; 
English looking in feature, of English stock, in 
fact; a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, who read 
nothing but the Richmond Enquirer and the Ge- 
nius of Liberty — the latter a weekly of the paleo- 
lithic age, printed, I believe, at Waynesburg, 
Pennsylvania. Some wag named him the "butt- 
cut of Democracy," chiefly because he was often 
called to preside over local meetings of .his party 
and always religiously voted the ticket. 

In the course of time and events, Uncle Judas 
inherited a fragment of a 'great English estate ; 
but he loaned the money so unfortunately that 
he was no better off than before. In his capacity 
as shoemaker, he fabricated the ugliest round- 
toed shoes that ever offended the artistic sense of 
a boy. I used to have to wear them ; and they 
were so homely, so honestly made and lasted so 
long, that I acquired a prejudice against the 
maker of them which he in no wise deserved. 

133 



A GENTI^EMAN OF THE OLD SCHOOL. 

A mile out of the Adllage lived an old Pennsyl- 
vania-Dutch farmer who had acquired with his 
second wife an ancient colored man who felt 
great pride in the fact that his name was Lee — 
a distinguished Virginia name, as he knew. It 
was only, however, when he was addressed by 
his mistress (a woman of social culture and gra- 
cious manners) that he knew he was a Lee. To 
the rest of the world he was only ''Old Black 
Joe." But despite this discouraging lack of rec- 
ognition, Mr. Lee did what he could to support 
the dignity of the name. He was a gentleman 
of the old school with courtly and ceremonious 
manners. His former master, in the remote past, 
had been a man of wealth and consequence ; and 
Mr. Lee felt that though family reverses had 
brought him down in the world, they could not 
degrade him so long as he supported his misfor- 
tunes with dignity. When Joseph Lee met a 
''white gemman," even on the highway, he re- 
moved his hat and tucked it under his left arm ; 

134 



on which account (perhaps in part) the hat in 
the course of years came to have a very crushed 
and battered aspect. 

Mr. Lee had married one of Uncle Brodie's 
freed girls, and had been highly successful in 
multiplying the distinguished family name, be- 
lieving, no doubt, it was impossible there could 
be too many Lees. 

Poor old man, whose lot was so hard and 
whose world so narrow ! I touch my own hat to 
his memory ; for I see him now, as I saw him 
so often, take off that battered tile and drop his 
eyes in humble deprecation. Though his skin 
was black and his lot was lowly, he was a gen- 
tleman and deserved far better than he received. 



135 



TIMBERING ON THE MONONGA- 

HELA— TEAMING, WITH 

EMBELLISHMENTS. 



''steam timber/' 

In that early day the cutting and rafting of tim- 
ber for the Pittsburgh market was a considerable 
business. The white oak of the upper Mononga- 
hela was famed- for the fineness and tenacity of its 
fiber. The rivers of the United States were then 
the great highways for the internal commerce. 
The era of railroads had not yet arrived. The 
steamboat trade on the Mississippi and its tribu- 
taries was important and prosperous. The Ohio, 
reaching farther east than any other western 
rivers through a populous region, was the great- 
est of the river thoroughfares next to the Father 
of Waters himself. Large quantities of white oak 
were required for building the frame-work of 
steamboats, and the Monongahela oak was pre- 
ferred in all markets it could reach. 

136 



Trees for ''steam timber'' were cut and shipped 
the full length of the stem, being hewed square 
as far up as fit for use. A "stick" of ''steam tim- 
ber'' might cube two feet at the base to one at the 
top and be fifty to seventy-five feet long. As the 
supply became reduced near the river, timber 
would be cut several miles away and hauled to 
the river on strong trucks made for the purpose. 
One end of the tree would be mounted on the low 
forward truck; the other swung under a pair of 
wheels six feet high. Along the top of the axle 
of this rear truck would be set a row of strong 
pins like cogs, in which a lever a dozen to fifteen 
feet long, pivoted in the "hounds" and timber for- 
ward, was shifted by the pilot who rode on the 
timber behind the wheels to steer the rear end of 
the load. By shifting the lever from side to side 
in these cogs, the truck would be skewed to ac- 
commodate the long tree to the sharp curvature 
of the road. When a tree had been cut on a steep 
hill, it" would be "snaked" down to the bottom 
with only the forward truck. 

137 



TEAMSTERS DIAI^ECT. 

The hauling of timber usually required a team 
of six horses, which were hitched in three pairs : 
the forward pair the ''leaders/' the rear the 
'Svheel-horses/' the one the driver rode being the 
''saddle-horse." The roads were narrow and un- 
even at best ; half the year they would be soft. 
It took a great deal of profanity on the part of 
the drivers to get through the ruts and over the 
steeps that had to be surmounted. The teamsters 
who made a business of this kind of hauling were 
apt to be expert in swearing and had their horses 
trained so as (in the language of the courts) to 
"understand the nature of an oath." From the 
particular form of expletive employed and the 
key in which it was pitched, experienced horses 
came to know when they were required to put 
forth their utmost united effort. One teamster 
was a noted character in the village on account 
of his expert — almost artistic — use of profanity 
in exhorting his team. If I might spread some of 
his original and picturesque oaths on this page, 
the reader would be surprised that so much rhe- 

138 



torical effect could be produced in that way. This 
man belonged to a family of substantial graziers 
and farmers, who heW slaves and hadiarge farms, 
and he might have been in an independent posi- 
tion ; but he seems to have been incapable of any 
higher ambition than to have a six-horse team 
and drive it himself. His old father, who came 
at intervals to see this degenerate son, was a 
striking figure, with a proud and dignified face 
and carriage. He always rode a spirited horse, 
and sat it with the air and confidence of youth. 

''ovm THE MOUNTAINS.'' 

The merchants in those days had to wagon 
their goods from Cumberland, Maryland, then the 
western terminus of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail- 
road. Spring and fall, teams would be outfitted 
for the trip. The wagons were of the ''Cones- 
toga" pattern, with curving beds and canvas cov- 
ers stretched over hoops, equipped w4th buckets 
slung behind and tool boxes on the sides of the 
bed. Some teamsters had bells attached to the 
hames on each horse. The professional who 
drove one of these teams felt a great deal of 

139 



pride in his turnout. When the time was at hand 
for the return of the goods wagons, much inter- 
est in their arrival was felt by young and old. 
Across the mountains they had the solid and well- 
graded Northwestern Turnpike. The tug of war 
came on the mud roads after leaving the solid 
footing of the turnpike. Language is not equal 
to the depiction of the way the poor horses floun- 
dered and tugged through the mud up and down 
the hills, while the vocabulary of even the most 
accomplished driver became a matter of tatters 
and shreds. 

THE HOME-COMING. 

News of the approaching wagons was gener- 
ally heralded in the village a few hours in ad- 
vance ; and when they drove into the town it 
would be to find an admiring concourse gathered 
to receive them. Sometimes boys would go out 
a mile or so and escort them in. When they 
passed down the business street, it was much as 
a conquering army comes back from a foreign 
shore. No victorious general of such a command 
could feel prouder than the driver, erect on his 
weary saddle-horse, his black-snake whip rest- 

140 



ing gracefully in the hollow of the left arm, the 
reins held with an air and front such as the old 
Greeks used to attribute to the gods restraining 
the fiery coursers of their chariots. No sooner 
had the wagons backed up to the stores than the 
merchants, all excitement and energy, began to 
unload and check their invoices; and every boy 
had a chance to help carry in boxes and bales and 
to feel that he was a part of the great business 
machinery of the town. 

RAFTING THE TIMBER. 

But these teams have drawn me away some- 
what from the timber business, about which let it 
be added that the ''steam sticks'' were hauled to 
convenient points on the river bank whence in due 
time they would be rolled into the water and 
rafted. The timber ''sticks'' were placed side by 
side and rafted together in "bents" with hickory 
or white oak "tie-poles" laid across and pinned 
to each stick. Hickory bows, which the raftsmen 
kept on hand, cut to length, bent and dried, were 
placed over the pole, each end in an augur-hole, 
each side of the pole in each stick; and wooden 
pins being driven into these augur-holes, the tim- 

141 



bers were securely bound together. When the 
first ''bent'' had been made wide enough, another 
was placed end to end with it, and, the length of 
the sticks being unequal, dovetailed into it, and 
tied with poles in the same way; and so on till 
the raft was as large as could be handled. Oars 
with long sweeps were rigged at each end for 
steering. In making up these oak rafts, it was 
necessary to incorporate a number of . poplar 
''sticks" to give the raft the requisite buoyancy. 
The oak was so heavy it would sometimes sink, 
and without the poplar floats would at best swim 
very deep and dip badly in crossing the dams, of 
which there were many before the locks on the 
lower river were reached; where steamers were 
employed to tow the rafts through slack-water to 
Pittsburgh or other point of delivery. 

RUNNING THE RIVER. 

In our river, rafts had to wait for a rise ; and 
the raftsmen knew just what the stage should be 
to enable them to get over the dams and around 
the bends. If the water was too low, they would 

142 



stick or tear on the dams ; if too high, they might 
run on the rocks in the sharp bends. So that it 
was the same old problem of Scylla and Charyb- 
dis. In shooting a dam, the forward end of the 
raft would sometimes dip so deep the men would 
be taken up to their waists in the water, or even 
be washed off ; but in pleasant weather they 
cared little for a wetting, and being expert swim- 
mers, had no fear. 

LOG RAF^TS. 

A good many cut logs — oak, poplar, black wal- 
nut, wild cherry and sycamore — were also run 
down the river. The logs would be cut twelve to 
sixteen feet long, rafted crosswise the stream, 
fastened with tie-poles along each end of the log 
in the manner described as to steam timber, with 
bow and stern oars for steering. These rafts 
usually embraced more poplar than heavier tim- 
ber and were buoyant and comparatively easy to 
control. The manner of rafting permitted them 
in shooting the dams to bend with the swell of the 
water; but if they struck they were more liable 
to part than the timber rafts. 

143 



THE SHADOW OF A TRAGEDY, 



A quaint old figure around the village for many 
years was Granny White, an old lady without 
children, the widow of a lame old tailor many 
years dead. She lived by herself, and for a time 
was able to earn a subsistence by sewing and 
knitting. The knitting was kept up to the last, 
for her fingers lasted longer than her eyesight. 
She was old when her husband died. Little or 
nothing was known of their early history; but 
there was tradition of a tragedy in the lives of 
the old couple antedating their location in the vil- 
lage. It was said he had fought a duel for her 
and killed the man who had a legal right to call 
her his wife, he himself being crippled in the 
fray. It was beHeved that both belonged to a dif- 
ferent sphere of life, and that after the episode 
which united them unlawfully they buried them- 
selves in this obscure village under an assumed 

144 



name, with little means, the old man resorting to 
the craft of a tailor to enable them to live. While 
he lived no breath of their secret ever escaped 
him, and after his death she was equally reticent. 
She never sought assistance from her family, if 
she had one, but lived out her allotted days in 
meek recognition, alike uncomplaining and uncon- 
fiding, of an irrevocable separation from all her 
early friends and life. 

A GENTLE OUD DAME. 

Granny White was a woman of evident refine- 
ment. Even when her hair was silvered and her 
skin shriveled, her face showed that she had been 
beautiful and her dark eyes still sparkled with in- 
telligence and merriment; for she was cheerful 
to the last, even when so reduced as to go to a 
neighbor to beg a pitcher of buttermilk, which 
towards the last was almost her only food. Her 
manners, always gentle, were those of a woman of 
breeding. She was not only tolerated but liked, 
and was not allowed to accept public charity. She 
lived for years alone in the little house from 

145 



which Miller Fontenay removed when he built his 
larger house ; and his frugal wife, who under all 
her anxieties had a tender heart, was always her 
friend and helper. 

''There is," says Cervantes, ''a remedy for 
everything but death." He might have added 
that death is a remedy for everything else. 
Through this portal we escape at last all the 
ills of life — pain, poverty, grief, loneliness, hu- 
miliation. This friendly door opened at last to 
this gentle old soul, and she passed through, out 
of sight forever to earthly eyes, taking with 
her the secret, whatever it may have been, whose 
burden she had borne silently, uncomplainingly, 
so many years. 



140 



A PIONEER IN THE WILDERNESS, 



At a very early day Robert Marston had set- 
tled among the hills of upper Bingen, had 
opened a store in that wilderness, poling his 
goods up the river from Pittsburgh in pirogues 
and trading in merchandise and whiskey with 
the rough woodsmen and settlers who had come 
in close on the heels of the Indians. In the 
course of years he became possessed of somic 
fifteen to twenty thousand acres of land, most 
of it then in woods, but later including valuable 
farms on some of which several of his own sons 
were established. At the time I knew of him, 
he lived in a manner even ruder than old Dr. 
Fontleroy, whose faults and virtues are de- 
picted in another chapter. His wife, a woman 
of beauty and refinement, had long since left 
him to live with her sons, driven to it by his 
increasing heathenism. Him I saw frequently; 

147 



her never but once. She was my grandfather's 
sister, a woman of striking beauty and dignity, 
with gray hair but fresh complexion. Uncle 
Robert had around his own habitation, which 
was of the roughest and most neglected char- 
acter, a lot of even ruder shanties in which his 
tenantry lived. The little farming done was of a 
shiftless sort. The place was more like a ranch 
than a farm, but lacked the thrift of either. The 
miserable cattle, horses and pigs were left to 
wander about and brow^se a scanty subsistence 
in summer, and to starve for lack of even this 
in winter. Every spring Uncle Robert sent to 
the tannery a wagon-load of hides taken from 
cattle that had died of starvation. In his latter 
days, he lived a sort of Tartar sheik among his 
wretched tenantry, all subsisting ofif the increase 
of the half-starved herds and the scanty prod- 
uct of his half-tilled acres. In an old store be- 
longing to him were still remnants of dry goods 
and bits of hardware that had been there for 
forty years. He had long since given up trade. 
Most of his time and energies were given to 

148 



fighting to retain possession of his wild lands, 
claimants for which frequently turned up and 
vexed him with suits. 

In his prime Mr. Marston must have been a 
remarkable man — bold, sagacious, masterful. 
He had a rough class to deal with in his early 
days in the wilderness. The fact that he so 
much more than held his own with them stamps 
him as a man of unusual force ; and in his age 
he was still a very striking figure. In a differ- 
ent sphere, he would have been a leader of men 
in business or politics. But his history, like 
that of the early French who settled in Canada 
— who abandoned civilization and took to the 
life of the woods as naturally as the savages 
with whom they fellowshipped— illustrates how 
by swift processes of degeneration the human 
creature turned loose from wholesome restraints 
and left to his own inclinations, goes back to 
savagery. 



149 



A WELL-TO-DO FARMER^S HOME. 



DWElvUNG AND FAMILY. 

The home of my paternal grandfather was 
but a few miles distant, but the intervention of 
some very high ridges seemed to double the 
distance and make a visit to him a formidable 
undertaking. The dwelling was a substantial 
building of hewed logs, a story and a half with 
a one-story annex which was at once kitchen 
and dining-room; while a smaller building ad- 
joining this was loom-house and served for stor- 
age and other utilities. To the rear of the main 
building frame additions had grown as the 
growth of the family made need for more room. 
My grandfather had been twice married. There 
were five children of the first family. The sec- 
ond wife was a widow, who brought a son of 
her first husband into the house ; and there were 
seven sons and daughters of the second family. 

150 



So that if the whole family ever came together 
at the board, it required fifteen places without 
any for visitors. That was the day of small 
things in many respects but not of small fami- 
lies. 

SUGAR-MAKING. 

The home farm was a fertile hundred acres 
lying in a valley and rising on the slopes of 
surrounding hills. The bottom land was a 
meadow, through which ran a brook. Scattered 
over the meadow was a grove of sugar maples. 
While the spring nights are still frosty but the 
days warm, the sap rises in the sugar-rriaple. 
The method of procuring it then was to bore the 
tree near the ground and drive in a ''spile" 
made of an alder, perhaps a foot long, with the 
pith punched out. Wood troughs a yard long, 
split from the cut of a 'tree and hollowed out 
like a canoe, set so as to catch the drip from 
the spiles, stored the sweet water, which was 
dipped out and carried or hauled to the ''camp" 
where large kettles reduced it to syrup or sugar. 

151 



•A boiling once begun was carried on till the 
kettle was finished. This sometimes prolonged 
the work till a late hour at night. A night 
camp, with its blazing fire and surrounding 
gloom, is far more interesting to a boy who is 
only a spectator than the same camp by day. 
The ''sugar-egg" was one form taken by the 
product. The shell, broken at one end and 
emptied of the egg, was filled with the liquid 
sugar from the kettle. This when solid made 
an acceptable bon-bon for children. If none of 
us were at grandfather's during sugar-making, 
on his next visit he was sure to bring his pockets 
full of ^ugar-eggs and choice winter-kept apples. 

ORCHARD, GARDEN AND NUTS. 

Around the house was an abundance of plum, 
pear and cherry trees ; near by a large orchard 
of choice grafted apple trees ; and in the orchard 
an apple house, partly underground, in which 
apples and cider were stored for the winter. 
On a gentle slope, at the foot of which was the 
spring, was a garden of an acre embracing every- 

152 



thing needed in a well-ordered kitchen garden, 
some old-fashioned flowers and arbors of culti- 
vated grapes. From numerous walnut trees — 
black and white — around the farm a few bush- 
els of walnuts and butternuts would be gathered 
each fall and thrown in the house loft to dry, 
against the time when visitors might like to 
make their acquaintance along about the winter 
holidays. On winter evenings, grandfather was 
accustomed to visit the apple house and bring 
in a basket of apples and a pitcher of cider. 
These were set down in the corner beside the 
''sitting room'' fire and between supper and bed- 
time took their part in the evening's entertain- 
ment. In this room coal from a ''bank" on the 
farm was burned in a grate. It was then a re- 
cent discovery that there was coal on the place; 
but now I hear that all the coal on the farm — 
and it is underlaid throughout — has been bought 
by a syndicate. The kitchen fireplace was the 
old colonial wide chimney place, with crane and 
hangers, the baking done in ovens set in a bed 
of hot coals and hot coals heaped on the lid. 

153 



There was a big wood-pile in the yard, where 
an enterprising boy could, if he liked, acquire 
the manly art of chopping and lay the ground- 
work- for becoming a Gladstone or Horace 
Greeley. 

BACON AND EGGS. 

An army of hens ranged the farm and made 
headquarters in the barn, in whose hay lofts I 
held a perpetual commission to explore for eggs. 
When I recall the perennial hunger of a healthy 
boy, the fresh eggs served with such ham and 
bacon as nobody sees in these packing-house 
days ; the abundance of fruits and nuts in sea- 
son ; the freedom to make the most of all the 
out-doors every hour of the day ; the royal wel- 
come to all the resources of this kingdom — it 
seems to me now my grandfather's was not a 
bad place to visit and that I was somewhat un- 
grateful not to go there oftener. His pigs were 
not of the razor-back variety but plump and 
round, Berkshires or Bedfords. He fattened 
them with corn, butchered them himself, pickled 
the meat with salt only and smoked it with dry 

154 



hickory. The bacon and hams at Uncle Bro- 
die's were cured by the same processes. Hams 
with such flavor are not to be had for any price 
from the great packing-houses of the present 
day. The process for making them should be 
added to the catalogue of Wendell Phillips' ''lost 
arts." 

THRESHING. 

Wheat was grown for the family bread. 
Usually it was threshed on the floor of the grain 
house with a flail. But sometimes the ground 
at the stack yards was smoothed for a threshing 
floor, and the grain trampled out by horses. I 
have been deputed at such times to ride a horse 
around the ring and lead another. By reason 
of the dust, and for other reasons — one of 
which was that it was too much like work — 
it was not an agreeable diversion. When the 
grain was supposed to be freed from the husk, 
the straw was raked off and the grain taken up 
and winnowed with sheets. A good many little 
stones and clods would be gathered up with the 

155 



wheat and had to be picked out by hand, — and 
it seemed to me better to stick to the flail. 

I^ISHING. 

On the hne of the brook, in the meadow, an 
excavation had been made to take out coal. 
This resulted in a deep pool many yards in ex- 
tent. The brook emptied into a creek a mile 
distant; and that, a few miles farther, into the 
Monongahela. Fish found their way along the 
brook till they reached the pool ; which, proving 
for them the ^ head of navigation, was thickly 
peopled with chub three to six inches long; the 
catching of which with hook and line made fine 
sport for warm spring days when the fancy 
turned to fishing. 

THIv OLD CLOCK AND SINBAD. 

In the sitting room of. the house stood a 
''grandfather's clock'' in tall red mahogany or 
cherry case, the face showing, in addition to the 
time, the day of the week and of the month 
and the phases of the moon. I used to listen 

156 



to the ''tick-tock" of the long pendulum and 
wonder why the note struck by it in one swing 
was different from that of the other, but 
never could arrive at a satisfactory solution. 
Beside the clock was a bookcase well filled 
with old volumes. I cannot distinguish any of 
them now except a large illustrated copy of the 
Arabian Nights, with pictures of Sinbad's ad- 
ventures, frightful genii, etc. This book was a 
treasury to me, and I would pore over it by the 
hour, lying either on the floor or on the wooden 
''settee." It was even more absorbing than the 
Book of Martyrs at Mr. Starke's. It opened to 
me the gates of a new world. I never presumed 
to doubt the amazing things related in it, but it 
did bother me a good deal to account for some 
of them. The general conclusion was, as well as 
I remember, that while they must have happened 
— else how could they ever have been put in a 
book — the time for such marvels had gone by 
and no such things could ever happen again — 
and more the pity ! 



157 



A SCION OF F. F. V.— NEPHEW OF 

LORENZO DOW— LITERARY 

ADVENTURE. 



A P^I^AVOR O^ OLD VIRGINIA. 

While still a lad, I was sent by one of the 
village merchants to take charge of a branch 
store at a hamlet a few miles away ; spent a 
summer there, and made some acquaintances 
whom it has been pleasant to remember. The 
one who came nearest me was a young fellow 
about my own age, youngest son of a family 
which valued itself not only on its good blood 
but its intellectual and social culture. The father, 
who had been dead some years, had been a 
magistrate and leading man in his part of the 
county. One of the sons had been educated at 
the Virginia Military Institute and became a dis- 
tinguished lawyer; another was a civil engineer, 
living at home with his young wife ;. another a 

158 



bachelor physician, also at home, in successful 
practice and popular for his social qualities. The 
next had charge of the farm and was possessed 
of reliable virtues. The youngest, who was still 
in the inchoate state and had not yet made up 
his mind what he would do or be, was handsome, 
chivalrous, affable, unassuming, perfectly correct 
of life and morals, filled with large though vague 
aspirations. He was done with school and was 
lying fallow. He helped a little about the farm 
when he liked. In harvest, he would go out to 
the meadow or field and show his elders how 
to swing a scythe or cradle, wearing buckskin 
gloves ; for among the things he was proud of 
were his hands which he took care to keep white 
and soft. Elder than he were two sisters, one 
married and living in the village; the other an 
old maid of such social graces, sweet temper and 
cheerful spirits that she was a general favorite. 
My young friend had the eye of an eagle and 
was a capital shot. Our acquaintance grew out 
of his habit of passing the store with a rifle on 
his way to the river, a. few hundred yards dis- 

159 



tant, to shoot the bass that came into the shal- 
lows when the water was low and clear in the 
long summer days. Having a rifle in the store, 
and business not being very pressing, I some- 
times locked up and accompanied him; was in 
time led to go to the homestead and meet the 
rest of the family and sometimes spent an even- 
ing there at checkers or chess. It was one of 
those old-fashioned homes in which the gentlest 
courtesy was united to the utmost simplicity. 

MY LANDI^ORD. 

The citizen in whose building the store was 
located kept a hotel and a bar at which he dis- 
pensed liquors, without, I believe, ever touching 
a drop himself. He was a nephew of the cele- 
brated pioneer preacher of a former generation, 
Lorenzo Dow, for whom he had been named. 
He was short and stout of figure and the best 
groomed man I had ever known; looked always 
as just out of a bath ; in summer dressed in spot- 
less linen, with polished shoes, and was as dap- 
per and exquisite as any city dandy. He had 

160 



beautiful teeth, which were his especial pride. 
His father had been editor of a county news- 
paper, and the son had grown up in an intellec- 
tual atmosphere. I could never reconcile the 
man with his occupation, regarding which he 
seemed not to feel the slightest moral scruple 
or sense of shame. 

Through this gentleman, I was led into a 
small literary adventure. A young farmer in 
the neighborhood, who had been away at school, 
had printed over his name in the Weekly Repli- 
cator, at the county town, a poem addressed 
''To the Rose." It was really, as I now think, 
a pretty fair bit of versification; but to my then 
critical temper it seemed rather sophomorical ; 
and one idle day, while waiting for customers — 
at instigation, no doubt, of that wicked one who 
''always mischief finds for idle hands to do,'' — 
I scribbled a criticism, taking a somewhat ridicu- 
lous view of this effusion, and later showed it to 
my dapper friend, the landlord. He was so 
amused over it nothing would content him but 
he must take it to his intimate friend, the editor 

161 



of the Replicator, on his next visit to the county 
town. In fact, he found it necessary to make 
that visit next day. The result was the next issue 
of the paper came out with the critique. It was 
printed anonymously; but there can be no such 
thing as anonymity in a small community like 
that, where everybody knows everybody, and 
it soon appeared that I had offended a wide and 
influential family connection. It is too long to 
recall the verses save the first two lines : 
•'What is it for which the humming-bird hums, 
As o'er the green meadow on swift wing it comes?" 

The argument was that it came to visit the 
rose. The critique undertook to show, I think, 
that it was not the rose; that the rose offered 
no inducements; that the humming-bird had 
other reasons. 

Two or three years later, my young friend 
found the future he had been looking for and 
joined the Southern army. Some three years fur- 
ther along, he was a prisoner at Camp Chase ; 
and it was my good fortune to be in a position 
where I was able to contribute some help towards 

162 



securing his release. He has been dead many 
years. We never met after I left his village; 
and when I recall him as he was then — gay, 
clean-minded, high-souled, gentle but proud — I 
am sorry life's currents did" not bring us together 
in later years. 

In another family in that hamlet, closely con- 
nected by ties of relationship with the one de- 
scribed, I sometimes saw during that summer, as 
a beautiful dark-haired girl of perhaps ten or 
twelve, the wife of the present Governor of West 
V'irginia, whose cause celehre has made her 
known far beyond the borders of the State. 



163 



SCHOOL DAYS— APOLLO BELVE- 
DERE—DARING RESCUE. 



OLD F^lElvD SCHOOI.S. 

Virginia at this time had no system of free 
education such as is universal now. Backwoods 
communities had to depend on themselves. There 
was a limited supply of teachers who undertook 
to impart the' ordinary English branches for a 
small consideration; and school was kept three 
months, six months or longer each year, accord- 
ing to population or other conditions. Sometimes 
a teacher would come along who had the genuine 
''call,'' the gift of awakening the interest in the 
pupil, which is the first step towards teaching. 
Other teachers would better have been plowing 
or grubbing thickets. 

Isaac A. Morse, an elderly man who had long 
been in the work, came nearer the ideal than any 
teacher our school ever had. He was not only 

164 



thorough in the curriculum of such a school, but 
he was something more. He had a happy, breezy 
way about him, and a kindliness of temper that 
won the confidence and good will of the pupils 
and was worth quite as much as the routine in- 
struction. While a dignified gentleman as occa- 
sion called for, he could unbend and be as jolly 
as a boy. In Isaac A.'s time and for years 
afterward, it was the practice to summon the 
school morning and noon by the blowing of a 
long tin horn, in absence of a bell. Uncle Isaac 
would often depute this duty to one of the boys, 
telling him to ''sound the gripsack !" In school 
hours he would at times give us friendly talks 
about familiar things, and boys who had the cour- 
age could ask questions and make observations. 
These informal lectures were unusual in such 
schools there at that day, and by the interest 
they excited were a valuable part of the instruc- 
tion. I recall that once in the springtime, when 
thawing suns had been shining for several weeks 
and fishing was nearly ripe, and the thoughts 
of the boys were running in the direction of the 

165 



river, he took a pliant hour and talked to us 
awhile about fishing. He told us what kind of 
hooks were best, what kind of bait to use at dif- 
ferent times, and how to put it on the hook ; how 
to handle the rod so as most to entice the finny 
tribe; what kind of places and at what hours 
the different varieties of fish were most likely 
to be found, and at what seasons fish of different 
species were in search of their food. Imagine 
anything more calculated to enlist the interest of 
a lot of boys on a warm spring day, with the 
schoolroom door standing open and the Saturday 
holiday near at hand. Then he would exhort us 
to work while we did work so as the more to 
relish the sport when the time for it came. 

Mr. Morse lived some three miles away over 
the hills and usually walked to and from his 
charge. When he went away we felt it to be a 
personal bereavement, as if we had lost some- 
thing more than a teacher. 

Another teacher was a Frenchman, who had 
strayed into our neighborhood and married an 
American wife. He was a man of scholarship, 
a fanatical admirer of Napoleon, had an irascible 
temper, and diligently obeyed the injunction of 

166 



Solomon about the use of the rod. He whipped 
a gang of boys one day (present company not 
excepted) because we went to the river for a 
swim during recess. A grammar-class was to 
recite during intermission; and judging from 
precedent how long it would take to hear the 
recitation, we thought there would be time for a 
hasty dip. It was very warm and the river was 
tempting. But it proved to be warmer after the 
swim than before. For some unforeseen reason 
the recitation was cut short. Perhaps the teacher 
got a hint of our escapade and dismissed the 
grammar class so as to make an example of us. 
Looking back to the episode now, I must admit 
we had a good deal of "nerve" to think we could 
go swimming at recess and not get into trouble. 
When Johnny Crapaud went away, few tears 
were shed by his pupils. 

Another teacher was from Pennsylvania — a 
sturdy, square-browed, resolute young fellow — 
who spent two or three years in the village, and 
was well-liked; but who, falling into a little dis- 
sipation, left abruptly and went farther south 

167 



into the mountainvS (up stream as usual).. He 
became a law student and later a practicing 
lawyer; and when he began the practice, having 
no resources beyond his brains and courage, he 
was independent and resolute enough to walk 
the rounds of his circuit. A few years later he 
was well established. I met him at Phillippa, 
where he was attending court, in the autumn of 
i860. Little could either then foresee that in a 
half a year that town would be the arena of 
the first military collision of a stupendous civil 
war, or that he would be the victim of a fatal 
mistake in the second collision, at Rich Moun- 
tain. 

AN ATTRACTIVE F'IGURE. 

While Mr. Morse was our teacher, staying in 
the village with his aunt for a time was a young 
gentleman who had been away at some academy 
and had finished his course. He used frequently 
to visit the school, being on terms of friendly 
intimacy with the teacher. He brought with 
him something of the outside world, whose skirts 
he had touched; and for my part, I was caught 

168 



by what I perceived to be a larger and more 
exhilarating existence than we led in the little 
village. I never received more than a word or 
nod from this young gentleman, but my admira- 
tion of him was none the less ardent. He had 
superior advantages of person ; was tall and ele- 
gant in figure; graceful, self-possessed- and dis- 
tinguished in air; had a face of manly beauty, 
dark of complexion, a fine nose of perfect 
aquiline, dark eyes, beautiful teeth, an engaging 
smile ; black, curling, close-cut hair ; and a de- 
bonair way about him not to be described in 
words. He dressed in broadcloth of faultless 
fit and wore ''gum-elastic" overshoes in winter. 
These were none of the modern makeshift af- 
fairs of cloth with a thin coating of indifferent 
rubber. They were of solid rubber, of such 
thickness and quality that strips cut off the edge 
made fine elastics. These shoes were accordingly 
an object of much interest to the smaller boys. 
He would sometimes gratify them by cutting off 
little strips with his handsome pen-knife for 
"stretch-leather." The practice once begun, it 

169 



was not easy to stop;' for ''the fatal precedent" 
was pleaded, and these inroads went to such 
length as to seriously threaten the integrity of 
the shoes ; and one day he declared that "some 
of these days'' he would throw the shoes into the 
yard and let the boys scramble for them., I re- 
member thinking with dismay how many bigger 
boys there were and how little chance there 
would be for me to secure any share of the 
spoil. But the crisis never arrived, and after a 
while my Apollo Belvedere went awa}^ It was 
discovered in due time that he had left a legacy 
of shame and sorrow for one poor girl who had 
yielded to his fascinations. A boy to whom the 
mother gave the name of a distinguished ad- 
mirer of Queen Antoinette was added to the pop- 
ulation. The m.other pined and died while he 
was yet a little fellow. 

A RESCUE. 

An incident connecting with a brother of this 
poor girl comes into my recollection so sharply 
I am moved to relate it in this connection. James 

170 



Boyle, of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, had come 
into the neighborhood to make a summer's cam- 
paign in cutting locust timber for wagon hubs, 
to be shipped down the river. He was a big, 
strong, hearty, handsome fellow whose manly 
qualities impressed all who came in contact with 
him. He had built a flat-boat to carry his cargo, 
had launched it from the old boat-yard at the 
mouth of the run, where it lay a hundred feet 
or so from the debouchment into the river. Back 
water from the river, then at freshet stage, made 
a depth of perhaps ten feet where the boat lay, 
close under a precipitous bank on one side. The 
hubs were being loaded so as to be ready to run 
out when the river should have fallen to the 
proper stage. On top of the high bank a num- 
ber of boys had collected to watch the operation 
of loading the boat. Boyle was aboard directing 
the work. Suddenly something tumbled down 
the bluff a few feet from me and struck the 
water beside the boat where there was a space 
of perhaps two yards between boat and bluff. 
Before we could realize what had happened, 

171 



/ 



Boyle with a flying leap went over the side of 
the boat at the same place, and in a few mo- 
ments — it seemed minutes — came up holding 
aloft in one hand something that looked like an 
enormous drowned rat. It was a boy, whom 
swift hands snatched- from the grasp of the res- 
cuer, who was quickly helped into the boat. 
Boyle shook the water off, like a big dog, wiped 
it out of his eyes, took a look at the boy and 
turned away to his work again as if this were 
an everyday occurrence. There was great ex- 
citement, of course, and as soon as the youngster 
got over his strangle he was hustled home. The 
father came soon after and made a feeling 
acknowledgment to Boyle for rescuing the boy. 
From what I knew of the lad in after life it is 
doubtful whether the risk taken by his rescuer 
was justified by the outcome; but as an exhibi- 
tion of the nobility of human nature at its best, 
the deed was beyond all calculable value. So far 
as I know the incident was never related in 
print or otherwise outside the neighborhood. If 
James Boyle (whose real name I give) be yet 
living, or any one connected with him, he need 
not be ashamed of the name. 

172 



THE REFORMED INEBRIATE, 



F^ACIUS DESCENSUS. 

At a very early day the great man of our vil- 
lage was proprietor of the only tavern there; 
was likewise a merchant; of good family con- 
nections, had some means, and was regarded as 
a ''smart" and successful man. But time proved 
the store a failure; the hotel did not earn the 
owner any money. It was too large for the 
business; of which there was little outside the 
sale of liquor. It seems the proprietor eventu- 
ally became too good a customer at his own bar. 
Perhaps this was the secret of his failure all 
round. Step by step on the downward road 
degradation and poverty kept an even pace until 
he had to give up the property altogether. 
Somehow he managed to scrape together enough 
to build a little hut, where with slight additions 
he and his family found shelter for some years 
thereafter. 

173 



7 



''on his uppers/' 

In his extremity, he set to work to cobble 
shoes. There is no reason to suppose he had 
ever known anything about shoemaking; but 
he seems to have resorted to this as a last re- 
source, learning the trade, as men do in penal 
institutions, from stress of circumstances. He 
made cheap shoes, but he continued to drink, — 
the one occupation absorbing all the profits of 
the other, — while the mother kept the children 
fed and clothed as best she could — matters going 
steadily from 43ad to worse. A few miles in the 
country was a small distillery where the poison 
could be had ''on the ground floor'' ; and when 
the demands of appetite became urgent, without 
waiting to realize cash on his wares he would 
send them to the distiller and barter them for 
the ''forty-rod'' product of the still on the best 
terms he could get. 

UI^K OR DEATH. 

Not to prolong the agony of such a history, 
the inebriate in due course arrived at the in- 

174 



evitable end. Delirium of the fiercest seized 
him. He was thoroughly frightened; for with 
all his depravity of appetite, he had no notion of 
dying. He sent for the Doctor John referred 
to in another chapter, who examined his condi- 
tion and told him frankly and impressively that 
he had to choose promptly between death and a 
total abandonment of drink. 

REFORM AND REHABILITATION. 

He gave up the drink, turned a new leaf and 
in a few months was a well man, with the scars 
of his dreadful experience, of course, but re- 
habilitated and resolute. From that hour, terri- 
ble as his cravings must have been, no drop 
ever passed his lips. He resumed his shoemak- 
ing and added to it a small butchering business. 
Seeing the sincerity of his reformation, people 
were glad to help him; and the money-making 
Shehan who owned the surrounding farms was 
the first to extend a helping hand by supplying 
sheep and cattle for his shambles. He prospered 
moderately; his family were better cared for; 

175 



his boys grew up to be worthy men. In later 
years he removed to the county town, where he 
maintained himself and the faithful old wife — 
who in their worst days had never reproached 
him — by dispensing a medicine which he doubt- 
less believed, and, what was more to the pur- 
pose, was able to make others believe, possessed 
remarkable virtues. It chanced that some years 
ago visiting the town whe^e he lived, I met him 
face to face on the street. ''The same old two- 
and-sixpence'' of thirty years before. He seemed 
to have scarcely changed a hair; but little gray 
though nearing eighty. There was mutual pleas- 
ure in the meeting, and after a review of old 
times and people, we parted, realizing that in all 
human probability we should never see each 
other again. 

TYPICAL. 

A simple common-place history, without a 
single element of novelty yet illustrative of one 
of the sorest struggles of human nature — the 
contest with its own besetting appetites; those 

176 



demons within us which are always conspiring 
for our ruin. With one it is this appetite that 
Hes in wait ; with another it is that ; but in what- 
ever guise the beast within us is allowed to get 
the upper hand, the result is the same. How 
many unhappy millions have trodden the same 
downward road as this wretched cobbler, sur- 
rendering to the tyranny of some imperious ap- 
petite everything worth living for — friends, for- 
tune, family, duty, the affections, hope itself. 
The story is not one of fifty years ago; not 
peculiar to one time, one locality or one country. 
It is old in every land, every neighborhood, time 
and season ; and told wherever related with every 
possible inflection of human misery. The vic- 
tims are not always, nor oftenest, the unlettered 
or the lowly; they count also the finest fiber 
and culture. Wealth and luxury, indeed, often 
prepare the way. Many a one born to the pur- 
ple grows to man's estate without the strength 
of a resolute manhood, which needs trial and 
struggle for its best development. Weakness of 
purpose and ill-regulated appetites bring him to 

177 



a misstep, and that to another ; for the downward 
road is easy and it is hard to find a place to turn 
back. From one descent to another he goes on 
— from one deep to another — till his ''steps take 
hold on hell/' and at last the final plunge! 

Different is the history of some born to pov- 
erty and inured to hardship, self-denial, self-re- 
straint. Filled with worthy aims and inflexible 
purpose, they grow upward, like lowly plants to- 
ward the sun — as Lincoln did; as Garfield did — 
as many do ; resting at last on the upper level of 
greatness and fame. 



178 



THE OLD SCHOOLHOUSE ON THE 
COMMON. 



ALMA MATER. 

In the re^r of what was then an open com- 
mon on three sides, stood a building erected be- 
fore my time for a church to be used by all 
denominations. It was in figure a parallelogram, 
a one-story, weatherboarded, unadorned, un- 
painted structure — never quite finished. For 
many years it served also for the village acad- 
emy. The building was not suited to be the 
shelter of a winter school. The audience room, 
while small for a church, was too large for a 
small school-room' and for the means provided 
for warming it. The building had never been 
''underpinned.'' It stood on stone pillars; and 
in the immemorial past, boards had been nailed 
up around them; but under the ravages of the 

179 



Goth, the Hun and the Vandal — especially the 
latter — the boards had nearly all disappeared; 
so that there was free ingress for the wintry 
winds and for old Doctor Fontleroy's swine and 
geese, which sought shelter there and often re- 
lieved the tedium of school hours with their 
noisy contention for the warm corner. The fleas 
left by them served to keep church audiences 
awake in summer. A feeble attempt to warm 
the room was made by an old cylinder cast-iron 
stove, short of stature, small of caliber, long past 
its prime, seamed and cracked with overheating 
in its vain efforts to do the work of a larger 
and better stove. The fuel was the native bi- 
tuminous coal, excellent of its kind — abundant 
and cheap — but not a great heat producer in 
such a stove. 

INCIPIENT CONF^LAGRATIONS. 

The stovepipe was chronically short. It had 
been fn service too long, and had a tendency to 
settle at the joints — like a man who has got past 

180 



his prime and begins to go down the hill of life. 
This pipe was supposed to enter a small brick 
flue in the ceiling w^hich rested on boards sup- 
ported on the joists. The edges of the boards 
came very close to the pipe, which, with the ut- 
most bracing up, barely reached the edge of the 
brick. When the pipe slipped down a little — 
as was its habit — a little extra heat ignited the 
edges of the charred boards, which would then 
begin to smoke. Keen olfactories would soon 
give the alarm, and then all would be excite- 
ment. The loft could not be reached, for such 
a thing as a ladder had not been known about 
the building since the workmen left it. The only 
way to put out the fire was to throw up water 
on it with a tin cup; and though these incipient 
fires were not infrequent, the tin cup brigade 
always managed to put them out. Such inci- 
dents were welcome to the school because they 
interrupted the monotony of lessons and aflforded 
a little excitment. The children would not have 
much grieved if the fire department had some- 

181 



time failed to get the conflagration under con- 
trol. At least, the old building would have been 
thoroughly warmed for once. In the front gable 
an opening a yard square had been left by the 
builders. This permitted free entrance to the 
cold overhead. The windows around the sides 
w^ere generously loose and open ; so that Jack 
Frost had the freedom of the school-room from 
all directions. There were times when school 
had to be dismissed on account of the severity 
of the cold. Thus matters went on winter after 
winter, but it never occurred to anybody to take 
measures to make the school-room more com- 
fortable. 



''swallow barn.' 



The opening in the gable permitted the swal- 
lows in summer to make their nests on the raft- 
ers. Sometimes when the door was left open 
in summer days, swallows would miss their 
bearings and fly into the school-room. This 
again was a happy diversion. In one of our 

182 



readers was Sprague's beautiful little lyric, ad- 
dressed to two swallows that had flown into a 
church: 

"Gay, guiltless pair, 
What seek ye from the fields of heaven? 
Ye have no need of prayer; 
Ye have no sins to be forgiven." 

These incursions served to illustrate the text 
of this lesson. 

THE SCHOOL COMMONS. 

Around the old building was a common, over- 
grown with dog-fennel in summer, wherein when 
in bloom swarmed a beetle known to us as the 
''June-bug," The common served for ball 
grounds. ''Two old cat" and "bull pen" were 
the favorite games; the latter affected by the 
young men from the farms, who disdained, as 
the college boy does now, to play any game 
which did not involve the risk of being killed 
or maimed for life. Another game, ''town-ball," 
was the modern baseball without the embellish- 
ments. 

183 



A TINGE OF ROSE. 

Like the faint fragrance of an almost forgot- 
ten perfume, comes down through the years re- 
membrance of sentiment that touched with 
roseate tints the skies of this early school life. 
In that school, as in the churches of that day, 
the sexes were separated. But while denied the 
propinquity which would have admitted of the 
whispered word or the surreptitious exchange of 
the written scrap, there was a ''wireless teleg- 
raphy" which afforded easy and instant com- 
munication. Talk of wireless telegraphy as a 
modern invention ! It is old as the race and has 
played its part in every repetition of the old 
story wherever told. Who could forget — or 
would want to forget till all is forgotten — the 
little thrills and palpitations that used to be 
transmitted from batteries of mischievous eyes 
on the other side of the room, or the opulence 
of meaning sometimes expressed when the gram- 
mar class wrestled with the conjugations of the 
verb ''to love" in the old Kirkham grammar. 

184 



Some of the delicious little romances then in 
the opening chapter ran on in later years to the 
completed story. Others, broken by untoward 
circumstances, withered like budding flowers 
nipped by an untimely frost. No more in human 
life than in the course of nature does the stream 
run smooth to a happy termination. 

DOWN GRADE. 

As time .marched on, this old church-school- 
house, which had never known the vanity of 
paint or repairs, went on likewise to its destined 
end. A new church, with bell tower — and later 
another — made the poor old structure seem 
plainer and more poverty-stricken than ever. 
The time came when it was closed alike to re- 
ligious and educational uses. A teacher who in 
summer was arrayed in spotless Irish linen, silk 
hat and polished boots, came into the village and 
sat down to stay. His wife had some money and 
he put up a building with school rooms on the 
ground floor. Then the common was fenced up 
and devoted to potatoes. As old friends are cast 

185 



aside when they have ceased to be useful, so this 
old house, shut off from even the companion- 
ship of the geese and swine, was sold with the 
lot and stored with hay. At the opening of the 
Rebellion, a battalion of Wheeling militia entered 
the village on a most inclement evening. The 
old building, partly filled with hay — humiliated 
and friendless but kindly and useful even in its 
extremity — gave them hospitable bed and shelter. 
Later still, it descended to be a stable for cattle. 
There remained but one lower deep, and that was 
reached when it became a pig-sty. Vale, Alma 
Mater ! 



186 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES OF THE 
OLD CHURCH. 



The old church was not always given over to 
the mere vanities of the intellect. Primar}^, and 
more important, was its function as a fortress 
whence heavenly missiles might be hurled at the 
Adversary of Souls. The religious community 
in this vicinage was made up chiefly of Metho- 
dists and Baptists — the former largely predomi- 
nating. There were not then enough Baptists 
to make up a congregation and maintain a 
preacher. The Methodists divided betw^een the 
Episcopal and Protestant branches. The Episco- 
pal were the more numerous, the more energetic 
and aggressive. Of Catholics or Episcopalians 
there were none. There was no aristocratic 
element to make any place for Episcopacy; no 
foreign element from which Catholics could 
draw ; and, indeed, the Catholics w^ere then and 

187 



there looked upon as little better than Anti-Christ. 
The religious observances were, therefore, most 
democratical ; and while confessing to a lack of 
belief in their creeds, I have always felt a sym- 
pathy with the freedom, cordiality and earnest- 
ness with which these good people gave them- 
selves to the observances and propagation of 
their religious faiths. 

For many years the old church was about 
equally divided between the Methodists Episcopal 
and the Methodists Protestant, each congregation 
usually having a ''circuit rider" or ''supply'' who 
preached alternate Sundays to large congrega- 
tions, some of whom rode long distances for the 
forenoon service. It was an animated scene as 
the hour for the meeting drew near. People on 
horseback, dressed in their best and gayest — 
the women with ribbons fluttering and riding- 
skirts flowing gracefully in the breeze — came in 
by the diflferent roads; and dismounting at the 
"upping-block,'' the women took off their long 
riding-skirts and carried them on their arms or 
hung them on the horns of the saddles, while 

188 



the young men stood around the church en- 
trance and ogled the pretty girls as they ap- 
proached. The favorite attitude of a youth on 
such an occasion was to lean against the end of 
the building and tap his boots with his riding- 
whip. 

At times some noted preacher would be se- 
cured, and then the crush from all the country- 
side would be very great. A drawing-card 
would be an eccentric, like Clawson, ''the wild 
man," who belonged in one of the back counties 
and held a relation to the church of that time 
and region not unlike that sustained by Sam 
Jones at a later period farther south. One Sun- 
day the pulpit was filled by a woman, whose 
presence there made a painful sensation. I am 
not sure but some looked upon it as almost a 
scandal. 

At certain seasons — usually in the winter, a 
season of relaxation, when the farm work was 
out of the way and the barns and cellars were 
stored with the autumn's bounty, and there was 
time and disposition for moral and intellectual 

189 



refreshment — revivals or ''protracted meetings/' 
would be held. These might last two or three 
days, or they might run two or three weeks. 
People of the present day who are accustomed 
to the formal and decorous observances of the 
churches in the cities and larger towns, cannot 
readily realize the unction and fervor, and the in- 
formality, of an old-time Methodist revival — 
which I have no intention of trying here tQ de- 
scribe. 

There were not many kinds of recreation for 
the people there in those days. No libraries, 
reading-rooms nor dramatic entertainments ; few 
social gatherings of any kind. The ungodly 
young people had occasional dances, and a formal 
''bair' on the Fourth of July — of all seasons 
just the wrong one. The good church people 
regarded dancing as anathema. They them- 
selves needed a little excitement at times as well 
as the ungodly; but their only resource was the 
church meeting; and for a big ''blow-out," such 
as all human nature craves once in a while, they 
resorted to the "protracted meeting." 

190 



Inseparably connected with the memory of 
such occasions are two of the brethren who were 
always active and conspicuous. No revival ap- 
parently could be — certainly for years none was 
— carried on without their presence. It was 
meat and drink for them, both religous and 
temporal. ''Charley" Clutter and Brother 
Bunney were the two inevitable, indispensable 
adjuncts referred to. Like the Siamese twins 
and the Union of the States, they were ''one and 
inseparable." Clutter was a man of many com- 
mendable traits, who chewed plug tobacco, 
worked hard and had reared a large family — 
rather at that time had such rearing in progress. . 
He had, however, it must be admitted, one fault. 
He was a bricklayer and built his chimneys with 
the draft wrong end up. Bro. Bunney was a 
little man, of the deepest piety. He w^as very 
poor, had no proper vocation that anybody knew 
of; lived on a rented patch a couple of miles 
out; but apparently had enough and enjoyed 
abundant leisure. Attendance on "meeting" was 
the one serious purpose of his life. After the 

191 



morning service he was accustomed to go home 
with some substantial brother to dinner; and 
since he was obHged to attend the evening 
prayer-meeting, he could not well refuse invita- 
tions to stay to the intervening tea. By a judi- 
cious system of stowage he was thus able to lay 
in enough on Sunday to carry him well into the 
following week. 

Brother Clutter was a man of talent and 
function. He was not only gifted in prayer but 
he was not above making himself useful in prac- 
tical church w^ork. He passed the plate when 
a collection was called for, and he was sexton, 
fireman, lamplighter and general director of the 
building for many years, without money and 
without price. In those days the old church was 
lighted with tallow candles. Two ''chandeliers," 
each consisting of a turned wooden ball about 
the size and shape of a modern football, hung 
from the ceiling, with gracefully curved iron 
rods set around the ball, with a tin candle- 
cup at the end of each. Similar candle-holders 
were set into the top of the pulpit each side of 

192 



the preacher. All these candles had to be snufifed 
from time to time lest the Hght grow too ''dim 
and religious" in the rear corners so as to en- 
courage the mischief always brewing there 
among a gang of unregenerate boys who ''came 
to scofF' but did not "stay to pray." In addition 
to frequent poking of the bituminous coal fires 
in the stoves, Bro. Clutter wielded the snuffers 
with a grace which conferred dignity on the 
office. Without absolute malice prepense, the 
mischievous boys in the rear corner were thor- 
oughly united in the one purpose to make life 
a burden to Bro. Clutter. He realized this and 
probably poked and snuffed often than strictly 
necessary because it enabled him to stand up and, 
under cover of his manipulation, cast observing 
glances at the disorderly corner to see who were 
the worst offenders. , 

Bro. Bunney was not especially distinguished 
in prayer, though very capable as a starter of the 
hymn and a fervent singer after it was started; 
but as a devotional poser he had no equal. While 
the congregation filled the little chamber with the 

193 



grand old melodies, he would stand just a little in 
front of the front row, with head thrown back, 
eyes closed in a beatific ecstasy, and keep time to 
the metre by rocking alternately on heel and toe. 
There was an unacknowledged rivalry between 
the Twins about leading in the services in the 
absence of Brother Voluble, who,. as he occasion- 
ally preached, was entitled to primacy when pres- 
ent. Sometimes, by unusual alertness. Clutter 
would get ahead of Bro. Bunney and start a 
hymn of his own preference. At other times 
they would cla^sh; and then the congregation 
would have to decide. But when it came to 
prayer, really Bro. Bunney could not compete. 
Despite the enterprising enemy in the rear cor- 
ner, Bro. Clutter would then, for the time, leave 
the enemy to his devices and give himself en- 
tirely to his theme. 

A good deal of praying was necessary at these 
protracted meetings ; and one could not but 
recognize that the field of prayer, like some other 
fields, became a sort of arena for emulation. 
Those who were ranked among the gifted, when 

194 



their turn came, sought to excel in striking 
metaphor and large rhetorical ernbellishment. In 
time it seemed as if the main object of prayer 
were almost lost sight of in the zeal to clothe it 
in beautiful and ingenious imagery. 

One part of these religious services I never 
wearied of was the congregational singing — 
what might be called a sort of ''free-hand'' de- 
piction of the grand old hymns. There was 
none of the jealousy nor bickering — none of the 
penny-whistle musical gymnastics — characteris- 
tic of the modern choir. It may be the notes 
were not always shaded to the precise color; 
perhaps all the brothers and sisters were not 
at all times singing in exactly the same time. 
But there w^as a grandeur and volume ; a swell, 
a roll and rhythm — a vibrant sympathy ancj fer- 
vor — a swing, a sweep and soul in the great 
composite voice, w^hen themes like ''Jordan's 
Stormy Banks" and "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" 
were rendered, that carried one along irresist- 
ibly, a w^illing captive. 



195 



THE GILDING OF A BOYISH 
SUMMER. 



THE^ SCION 01^ ROYALTY. 

It was Byron who asked ''Who would not be 
a boy?'' An apt question. For the boy after 
he has passed the narrows of childhood, imme- 
diately inherits the earth. He is the recognized 
possessor of eyerything that is joyous and al- 
luring in life. His are all the rights, privileges, 
immunities, prerogatives, opportunities of the 
world. He is the irresponsible lord and master 
before whom all things abase themselves with 
tenders of service, as did the slaves of the lamp 
before Aladdin. 

"'sCHOOIv OUT i^OREVER/'' 

When the winter term nears its end, from day 
to day the hours are reckoned. Now it is only 
a week till school will be ''out forever.'' "For- 
ever" means the summer; but a summer is then 

196 



■as long as forever is to later years. At length 
comes the ''last day/' whose sun rises with more 
than the glory of Austerlitz and goes down with 
a gilded promise of to-morrows which stretch 
away in a limitless perspective of joy — with all 
the ''splendid distances/' the "recesses of inef- 
fable pomp and loveliness'' which Emerson finds 
in the sunset. "But/' he asks, "who can go 
w^here they are, or lay his hand or plant his 
foot therein?" Who but the boy just out of 
school ? 

About nine to twelve is the "golden age" of 
the boy. Then he is old enough for enterprise 
and still young enough to behold the world 
around him clothed only in beauty. It is a time 
when he sees all things through eyes of felicity; 
when everything yields him pleasure — and profit, 
according to his method of bookkeeping; when 
his dividends come to him in the finest coinage 
that is ever turned out of life's mint. He has 
the secret of the alchemy for which the philoso- 
phers sought through all the ages, and it turns 
everything to gold for his enrichment. 

197 



THE ENCHANTING PROGRAMME. 

After the school is over, there is so much be- 
fore him ; so many things waiting for him ! The 
sap is coming up into the sweet birch that growls 
along the river cliffs. The wintergreen, on 
banks fringed with the flowering laurel, is at its 
greenest and its crimson berries are peeping 
their reddest. The woods, just putting on their 
neutral grays of half-opened leafage, invite him 
to the seclusion of their growing shades. There 
are scions of ash and white walnut to be cut 
and shaped into mellow-voiced whistles. There 
are ''sourwood" canes to be striped over a brush 
fire. If the day be warm, there is a spring at 
the head of a hollow that must be scooped out to 
make a drinking basin; and we sit and rest 
while the turbid water clears away before the 
crystalline stream that pours from the rocks 
overhung with roots and mosses. We lie prone 
and stretch out our necks to drink just as the 
first boy did millions of years before cups and 
goblets were invented. Hunger drives us home 
at sharp meal-time, for it is too early yet to find 

198 



anything in the woods to eat. We do chew the 
bark of the spicewood and sassafras; but that 
sharpens rather than appeases our keen appe- 
tite ; and on the way home we take in a httle 
swamp where we know there is calamus. 

The persuasive balm in the air hints of fishing 
time and promises that it will soon be warm 
enough for swimming. It is already warm 
enough to go barefoot. The spring freshets make 
excitement and sport. The turbid flood in the 
Run makes great rapids out of riffles which chal- 
lenge us to roll up trousers to the thigh and 
wade through their impetuous breakers. We 
drag the drift ashore and make rafts with slabs 
from bereft saw-mJU yards, and on these navi- 
gate dangerous deeps. The floods in the river 
yield a more subtle interest. We stand on the 
bluffs all day and watch the yellow bank-full 
stream roll by with great trees, logs and drift- 
wood, often with rail fences, pigpens, cabins, 
even dwellings, mills and bridges if the flood be 
a great one. If it comes in the autumn, there 

199 



will be yellow pumpkins, corn-shocks and hay- 
stacks. 

There is a companionship in a river which has 
always prompted men and tribes to seek its bor- 
ders. It is not alone the convenience nor even 
the pleasure they connect with it that constitutes 
the attraction. There is an undefined mystery 
about a stream which joins us in a sense to other 
lands we would fain know more of than it tells 
us. It comes with a message from unknown 
places and passes on to other places equally un- 
known. Curious man speculates on the seques- 
tered regions it touches. It offers a highway 
for the direction of his thoughts, and tenders 
him its service as both guide and carrier ; and, as 
result, human migrations are prone to follow the 
lead of a stream, up or down. 

The boy may be conscious of this mystery of 
the river but he could not define it. He wanders 
. along the blufif and feeds his eyes on its eddying 
waters. When the river is low in summer he 
seeks its margin and picks up curious stones and 
shells. He wades in the shallows, turns up the 

200 



shingle and sees the crawfish scurry backwards 
into deeper water. Perhaps he finds a Httle tur- 
tle and carries it off captive by the tail. He may 
uncover a water-snake; and that means a battle, 
for he kills snakes, as he breathes, by action of 
the involuntary muscles. The fascination of fish- 
ing will come to him later. Now he only wan- 
ders and explores with vague thoughts and ex- 
pectant eyes. 

There are fields all around that have to be 
ranged; hills to be scaled for the view; trees 
to be climbed for birds' nests. There are pas- 
tures from and to which cows are to be driven 
night and morning. This has the alloy that it 
is useful and is made a matter of duty. But the 
degradation of this is relieved by the presence 
of certain ''bumblebees" and hornets' nests in 
the pasture fields which afford opportunity for 
adventure. Hornets and bees are fighters — 
veritable Boers, for they fight for their homes 
and believe thoroughly in the right of self-de- 
fense. They are not aggressive ; but wdio ever 
saw a boy that could let them alone? The '*bum- 

201 



blebee'' wields a savage dagger, and the black 
hornet goes straight to the mark Hke a bullet. 
The boy who receives a shot from its rapid-fire 
needs to have grit to attack the lint-built fortress 
a second time the same day. But there are 
other days, and there need be no doubt about 
the final result. 

There are stray mulberry trees in the fields, 
service trees in the woods, raspberry briers in 
the fence corners and on certain rocky banks, 
all needing attention in their season, and receiv- 
ing it. Picking blackberries, a little later, is 
combining pleasure with profit; and although 
the boy, by his constitution and by-laws, is 
averse to doing anything that is useful, he 
must have a hand in this. The blackberry crop 
is an important staple, the picking of it not only 
a commercial duty but a sort of social function. 
The girls go to the blackberry ''patches" as 
well as the boys and the elders. It is necessary 
for the boys to be there to see that the girls 
do not get scared at the little green snakes, 
w^hich all know are ''sure death if they bite you.'^ 

202 



''If ? And then it would be a very poor 

excuse of a boy who would not want to pick a 
few cupfuls of berries to help fill a girl's bucket, 
and carry it for her when they start home. 

There are long summer days — so long, so de- 
licious — a sort of interregnum between the early 
summer fruitage and the later autumn ripening 
— a lull in the season of adventure, when inclina- 
tion suggests repose ; when the irrepressible boy 
surrenders to the drowsy influence of the dol- 
drums and loafs and invites his soul. These long 
•sultry days, between the three cardinal points of 
mealtime, he spends under the trees on the 
§^rass, with "mumble-the-peg" or other languid 
pretence of play. Wearying of this, he lies on 
his back and listens to the notes of summer birds, 
as idle as he. Then, as the restlessness of na- 
ture reasserts itself, ' he resumes his boyish 
sports. If the dog star be very fierce, he hies 
him to the ''swimming-hole" in the river and 
finds escape from Sirius in the shaded and pel- 
lucid waters. 

203 



West of the river the great wooded hill rises 
a mile back into a peak that overtops all its fel- 
lows for miles around. The crest of this height 
is crowned with a peach orchard, where, be- 
cause it is lifted so high above the humid air 
of the valleys, frost rarely hurts the buds, and 
the trees, year after year, bend and break under 
their luscious burden. The abundance is so 
great, the market so small, generosity in the 
matter of fruit so much a matter of course and 
of custom, that visitors go to this orchard and 
share with the owner his bountiful crop. We 
are free to ''eat to the full,'' to fill pockets, hand- 
kerchiefs, hats. And such peaches ! The deni- 
zens of great cities who eat peaches that hav« 
been picked half -green and carried long dis- 
tances, at prices that impart the bitter taste of 
the coin, do not know the quality of a generous 
peach just ravished from the tree, still warm 
with the fire of the sun and throbbing with the 
juices that have scarcely ceased to flow. 

Looking down from this ''peach knob," the 
vision sweeps across a great basin filled with 

204 



hill and valley clothed in the tinted verdure of 
early autumn, whose ''utmost purple rim'' is a 
dozen miles from the center where we stand. 
Sometimes we remain till evening to see the 
moon rise, and walk home in the ambrosial for- 
est air, though leafy intervales, under the ob- 
scure light and shadow which assume mysterious 
and threatening shapes in the woods at night. 

Later, the woods lure us again to their fra- 
grant depths. After a few frosts the maples scat- 
ter their profuse gold, yellow and red, and we 
tread a carpet, with a pile deeper than Wilton, 
with colors that shame the Tyrian dyes. We 
wander under the splendid arches of nature's 
great cathedral, decked from dado to dome with 
the gorgeous portraiture of the season, reveling 
in designs and splendors the imitation of which 
has tasked the skill of man in all the ages of 
art. Frequent chestnut trees invite us to pause 
and brush aside the tapestries of the ground in 
search of elusive nuts, while pretty squirrels, 
whose preserve w^e invade, scamper up the 
neighboring trees and, sitting on branches 

205 



against the trunk, plume cocked over back, chat- 
ter and bark their protest against our trespass. 
Here is a fertile swale where, above a thicket 
of witch-hazel, the blue-grape disports itself in 
a tree-top, and we climb to perilous heights and 
swinging in hammocks of interwoven vines re- 
lieve them of their odorous burden. 

Scattered in pasture fields are other chestnut 
trees, spared by the woodman many a year be- 
fore, ready to drop their rich-hued nuts into the 
pockets of nomadic boys, who, like the provident 
squirrel, have begun to lay up stores for the win- 
ter. In certain hollows of these fields, fed by 
springs that yield us their crystal tribute, are 
trees of 'the wild red plum, ripe and ready for 
the spoiler; and even black haw bushes, with 
their little dead-sweet berries, come not amiss to 
the catholic and cosmopolitan appetite of the rov- 
ing boy. On river bottoms that we know grow 
''paw-paws," now ripe ' but distant enough to 
make a visit to them rise to the dignity of an ex- 
pedition that will take the greater part of a day. 
We may find these still on the bush for they 

206 



cling to the leafless bough long after the frost 
has stripped it. The paw-paw has not so wide 
a fame as its merits warrant. It is a sort of 
second cousin to the banana; and boys who 
never saw a banana are content with the virtues 
of this second cousin. 

There are other enterprises on the boys' pro- 
gramme. As winter approaches, the black wal- 
nut and butternut trees have to be visited, with 
baskets, or, what is better, a little wagon; for 
no boy will carry a basket load if he can com- 
mand a wagon to haul it. Base is the slave that 
carries ! Hulling walnuts involves stained 
fingers and lips m^ade sore by the acrid juice. 
Hickory nuts, too, have to be gathered. After a 
few^ frosts these drop from the hull and may be 
picked from the ground. But no boy of spirit 
will wait for this. He will club them off- half 
green and maul them out of their reluctant hulls. 
Walnuts and hickory nuts, and chestnuts, too — 
and hazel nuts, if he can find them, for they are 
not plentiful — are among the necessaries of life 
in the calculations of every well ordered boy 

207 



to be provided against the wolf of the holiday 
times. Beech nuts are abundant, the beautiful 
beech trees growing luxuriantly on the slopes 
and bottoms along the river. This little nut, 
very sweet when dry, is a favorite with the squir- 
rels when the hickory nut crop is short; but it 
is rather small to suit a boy, who likes to do 
with large affairs. He will, however, gather^ a 
small quantity to carry around in his pockets 
for the game of ''hull-gull." 

''Happy times and happy ages," quoth Don 
Quixote to the^ goatherds, "were those which the 
ancients termed the Golden Age, not because 
gold, so prized in this, our iron age, was to be 
obtained in that fortunate period without toil, but 
because they who then lived were ignorant of 
those two words, mine and thine/' In the golden 
age of the boy he knows no such distinction as 
applied to anything out of doors. The earth and 
the fullness thereof are his. He claims proprie- 
tary rights over all things that grow in fields 
and woods by that oldest of titles to sovereignty, 
the right of discovery. The land and its fruits 

208 



wherever found belong to his tribe by a title 
no mere paper deeds or conveyances can dispos- 
sess him of. 



The boy who was born and bred amid city 
surroundings knows nothing of these experi- 
ences. He has missed much that gives firm 
heahh and force of character to his more favored 
fellow in the country. The city boy does not 
know what it is to be on intimate terms with the 
clouds, the woods, the fields, the hills, the rivers ; 
with animals and birds, insects and reptiles, in 
their own homes. Nature has never taken him 
into her confidence. He has missed the maternal 
affection of mother earth .for the children who 
have been nourished in her bosom ; and however 
rich, or great, or distinguished he may become, 
he has suffered deprivations nothing can ever 
compensate him for. 



209 



A LAST BACKWARD GLANCE. 



Here let us pause. It is a path which might 
grow wearisome pursued too fan As we ap- 
proach the end of life's tether, all go back lov- 
ingly to the scenes and experiences of earlier 
years, when the world was fresh and our 
thoughts unsullied. The memory of these comes 
back to us over the bridge of intervening years 
which sometimes we would gladly forget. We 
have the testimony of Dame Quickley that even 
Falstafif, at the end of a life steeped in grossest 
animality, went back in his last delirious hours 
to the scenes of his childhood and ''babbled o' 
green fields. '' 

It i3 not in vain — Whittier to the contrary — 
that we recall the dreams of our youth. They 
are to the worn spirits of later years like the 
"sweet influences of Pleiades." Though we can- 
not go back and live the young life over, its 
sweetness is a possession that cannot be taken 
from us while memory endures. 

210 



These last lines are written ,with a realization 
that I shall never revisit the scenes of these re- 
membrances. It would not be an unmixed pleas- 
ure if I could. The interval has been too long. 
Change has come to others as to me. The old 
friends are there no longer. Nothing remains 
as it was save the river, the hills, the skies. Nor 
even they. Alteration has been wrought in the 
face of nature. Landmarks have disappeared, 
and coke-burning clouds the once cerulean 
heaven. A railroad cut through the border of 
the village has marred the beauty of the river 
margin and destroyed the paths we strayed in 
along its banks. The shriek of the locomotive 
has driven away the silence that dwelt among the 
hills. A new generation has buried the old. I 
should be like a stranger in a strange land and 
could find little to connect me with the buried 
past. 



"O, World! O, Life! O, Time ! 
On whose last steps I climb," 

The way grows somewhat weary and seems 

painfully brief in the retrospect. Inexorable is 



211 



the decree of nature in which all her children are 
bound. We may resent but we cannot annul 
or resist it. By every means known to science 
and intellect, we stretch out the golden thread of 
''this pleasing, anxious being'' to the last line of 
tenuity. But we know it is only a postponement 
of the inevitable. The human creature is so con- 
stituted that he has his doubts about everything 
he cannot prove. He prefers the ''sure thing." 
He knows what is here ; he does not know what 
may be in the hereafter— does not even know 
there will be a hereafter. So by the most deeply 
implanted law of his being, he clings to the 
known, the present, the real, and regards with 
profound reservations the problems that lie be- 
yond the veil. Yet whether we will or no, life 
and time bear us "onward like a mighty river.'' 
The most we can do is to look back sometimes to 
tender memories one lingering moment — hasting 
not, resting not (as Schiller hath it) as we pass 
on to the "Silent Land," while 

"Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather 
And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand." 

I^INIS. 
212 



WORKS BY SAME AUTHOR 



DAUGHTER OF THE ELM 

An Old-Time Tale of the Upper 
monongahela 

Second Edition 

336p,^ 8vo,,^ Cloth, Illustrated, $1^25 



THE RENDING OF VIRGINIA 

A History 



Showing how the old commonwealth was used 
to precipitate the Rebellion, with an authentic 
account of the Restoration at Wheeling and the 
later Division of the State 



62op,, Cloth, Illustrated, $2,00 



Address : A. C. Hall, Glencoe, Ills. 



kUb 31 WO' 



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